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Payroll Employment Up 162,000; Unemployment Rate Steady at 9.7 Percent

In March, payroll employment rose by 162,000. This followed upward revisions for the months of January and February that totaled roughly 40,000 jobs. March was the first month of significant payroll gains since late 2007.

The improvement in payrolls was generally broad-based; however, it was boosted by two factors. The first was the temporary hiring of census workers. Federal employees rose by 48,000 over the month. The other factor was the temporal displacement from February due to the east coast snow storms. It is likely that some hiring that would have occurred in February, occurred in March instead, especially construction sector jobs, which grew for the first time since June 2007. Manufacturing payrolls rose for the third consecutive month. The private service sector added about 82,000 jobs, half of them temp service hires.

Despite the payroll number gain, the unemployment rate, which is measured by a different survey, remained steady at 9.7 percent. Due to the smaller sample size of the unemployment survey, it tends to be more volatile and single-month changes often are less meaningful than a multiple month trend. The labor force participation rate, which had fallen sharply for months hitting a 24 year low in December as more workers likely became discouraged, rose for the third straight month by 0.1 percent. Over the past three months over 850,000 people joined the workforce. As payrolls begin to improve, it is likely that many discouraged workers will rejoin the labor force. This will be a damper on lowering the unemployment rate.

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