Employers Add 165k Jobs in April: Previous Estimates Also Increased

According to today's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers added 165,000 more jobs last month. Industries that added jobs included professional and business services, food services and drinking places, retail trade, and health care. The unemployment rate fell slightly, to 7.5 percent, a four year low.

Job creation estimates for February and March were increased by a total of 114,000, a reassuring development as job growth had been seen as particularly weak in March.


Some interesting points about today's jobs report from around the web:

• Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research: "One issue worth emphasizing from this and past reports is that there is zero evidence that the prolonged period of high unemployment is due to a lack of skills of the workforce."
• Chad Stone at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "The Fed has recognized that unemployment is too high and there is no immediate threat of inflation.  It’s time for lawmakers to recognize that unemployment is too high and there is no looming debt crisis...Despite 38 months of private-sector job growth there were still 2.6 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 2.0 million fewer jobs on private payrolls in April than when the recession began in December 2007."
• Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution: "As of April, our nation faces a jobs gap of 10 million jobs." They also have a neat calculator where you can input your own job creation rate and see how long it will take the United States to close the jobs gap at that rate.
• By definition, the official unemployment rate does not count those workers who have given up and stopped looking for work, nor does it take into account those who are underemployed. For those figures, you have to look at the alternative measures of unemployment. By the most inclusive measure, unemployment stands at 13.9 percent (that's still significantly below the 17.1 percent it was in late 2009).
• The big problem is still long-term unemployment, according to the New York Times, among many others.