The American economy added 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest burst of hiring in three years, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%, the level it has been at for the last three months.
The March job gains, which were boosted by temporary hiring for census work, marked the biggest one-month increase since 239,000 jobs were generated in March 2007, roughly 3 years ago. The latest gain was slightly lower than what many economists had been forecasting, but the government also revised upward the payroll count for the first two months of the year. It revised the January payroll date to a creation of 14,000 jobs, instead of losing 26,000 as previously reported. And the losses in February were shaved by more than half, to 14,000.
The news of the hiring last month will be welcomed news to the 15 million jobless American workers. But the latest report somewhat overstated the strength of a slowly recovering labor market. About 30% of the payroll increases last month, or 48,000 jobs, were positions created by the Census Bureau, which is expecting to hire hundreds of thousands more workers in the next couple of months to knock on doors and collect data for the decennial count of the nation's population. Many of these jobs are part-time and will last only several weeks.
However, this jobs report shows that the economic recovery seems to be gaining some momentum as we head into the second quarter of the year.
