More People at Work Despite ‘Puny’ Job Gain

The nation’s unemployment rate edged down to 5.2% last month despite the smallest increase in new jobs in four years, the government said today.

The jobless rate had held steady at 5.3% for the previous nine months.

In California, the jobless rate stood at 5.2% in March, up from 4.9% in February.

The nation’s manufacturing slump continued, with a loss of 30,000 factory jobs in March, the Labor Department said in releasing the unemployment report, the first comprehensive look at economic activity for the month. That brought manufacturing job losses to 100,000 since November and 250,000 over the past year, the department said.

The jobless rate dropped even though only 26,000 new jobs were created in March. Most analysts had been predicting that the economy would produce around 170,000 new jobs last month. The 26,000 new jobs were the fewest produced since June, 1986.

More than 350,000 new jobs were produced in both January and February.

Total employment rose slightly in March to 118.3 million, and the labor force edged up to about 124.8 million.

Michael Evans, who heads an economics firm in Washington, said unemployment fell despite the weaker-than-expected increase in jobs because the government’s figures typically lag and reflect a previous month’s activity. That means the fewer jobless Americans in March benefited from the healthy gains earlier in the year.

“I don’t think it’s a negative report, even though job gains were kind of puny,” Evans said.

He noted that for the January-to-March period, jobs gained an average of 250,000 a month.

The government said that for the first quarter, there were about 750,000 so-called discouraged workers, or people who have given up looking for jobs. That was the lowest level since the first quarter of 1979.