Unemployment ticked up a notch last month, as a welcome surge in jobs failed to keep pace with the number of people looking for work.
The Labor Department Friday said companies added 308,000 workers to their payrolls last month, the strongest increase in the last four years.
"This is the first report that paints a picture of a job market in recovery, showing solid job creation in a number of sectors," said John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an outplacement firm known for its frequent surveys of workplace trends.
Some independent analysts, however, said it's too soon to declare victory over the country's vexingly slow pace of job creation.
"There's not a sustained growth in the job market yet," said Gerald Purgay, senior vice president at DBM, a Connecticut-based human resources consultancy. "There are mixed messages." For one thing, there is a great deal of pent-up demand for jobs, leading to a crush of people entering the work force last month. So despite the new jobs, the unemployment rate -- based on the number of people actively job hunting -- rose to 5.7 percent from 5.6 percent.
Nevertheless, administration officials seized on the new hiring as proof that the economic policies of the White House -- primarily large tax cuts and aggressive courting of free trade agreements -- are working.
Making his seventh visit to the battleground state of West Virginia, President Bush declared: "The policies are working." U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao concurred, saying the March report "is more evidence the economy has turned the corner and the nation's job market is getting stronger every month." While that may be, the White House could remain vulnerable on the jobs issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, in part because the manufacturing sector remains in a slump.
Since Bush took office more than two million factory jobs have disappeared, most of them concentrated in politically key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
"Today's unemployment report is good news, and we hope it will be sustained," said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO labor organization. "But this report does not erase our nation's jobs crisis." In that context, presumed Democratic nominee John Kerry sought to put Friday's report in the context of longer-term trends.
"George Bush went to West Virginia to discuss the economy today," Kerry said, in a statement on his campaign website. "What he neglected to mention is how his failed economic policies have cost the state thousands of manufacturing jobs or how his administration continues to insist that Americans losing their jobs to countries overseas is actually a good thing." In South Florida, the labor market has reflected the mixed messages of recent employment reports.
In the last year, Broward has added 16,100 jobs, and its unemployment rate of 4.7 percent is safely below the national average.
But Miami-Dade has produced just 4,500 jobs, and its jobless rate of 6.3 percent is substantially above the U.S. rate.
In an economic irony, the tepid job creation nationally has occurred against a backdrop of strong growth, low interest rates and mild inflation -- often leaving analysts befuddled as to why companies haven't been hiring.
Experts say one factor has been sharp rises in productivity, which means companies are hiking output without adding workers.
Second, many jobs being created by the American economic recovery are actually in other countries -- like China and India -- where positions in manufacturing and technology have been outsourced.
Andrew Stettner, a policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project, said these trends were helping create another troubling trend -- long-term joblessness. Stettner said roughly one-fourth of jobless workers had been unemployed for more than six months.
He suspects that's because many of the jobs lost in the last few years are simply gone for good.
"There are very few temporary layoffs in the economic cycle now," he said. "In the 1970s and 1980s, people got called back. Now you have permanent jobs destruction."
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