The nation’s long-lingering jobs problem has begun to resemble a movie plot that can leave viewers cheery, gloomy or downright confused.
You might have been encouraged by the government’s report Friday that 177,000 jobs were created nationwide last month.
That included 12,000 jobs for factory workers, who hadn’t seen any employment growth since March.
There also were 30,000 more construction jobs in October, the largest one-month gain since May for an industry badly hurt by the slumping economy.
The slight increase in the U.S. jobless rate, to 6.8 percent last month from 6.7 percent in September, is not a particularly worrisome sign, experts said. It most likely reflects renewed job hunting by workers who had stopped looking, they said.
Their return pushed up the number of jobless, and as a result the jobless rate, they explained.
“In general, it’s good news. It shows the economy is accelerating, although at a substandard rate,” said Mark Zandi, an economist with Regional Financial Associates in West Chester, Pa.
Laurence Meyer, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis agreed, saying the latest figures “confirm that the economy is picking up.”
He said the nation’s payroll expansion likely will average 150,000 to 200,000 new jobs a month for some time to come. In a normal recovery, the nation adds about 250,000 jobs monthly.
But other analysts weren’t as encouraged, saying they aren’t convinced the economy is on a steady rebound.
“If a man came from Mars and looked at the numbers, he would say, `I don’t know what the excitement is about’ ” said Sam Kahan, an economist with Fuji Securities in Chicago.
Experts could not explain, for example, why Illinois had the third-highest jobless rate among the 11 major industrial states. The state’s jobless rate fell to 7.8 percent last month from 8.5 percent in September, and the number of unemployed dropped 43,000, to 473,000.
“We’ve had a hard time getting a handle on that,” remarked Diane Swonk, regional economist for First Chicago Corp. Others suggested that the state’s high jobless rate may be tied to the long-term weakness of factories across Illinois.
Nationally, the report raised questions about employers’ willingness to hire new employees, and what kinds of jobs are being created in the slower-than-usual recovery.
Appearing before the U.S. Joint Economic Committee, Katherine G. Abraham, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, noted that factory overtime is at an all-time high and hiring by personnel supply firms has made up 21 percent of total job growth since February 1992.
Personnel or temporary help firms now account for 2.1 million jobs, she said.
The figures, Abraham said, “suggest that some employers have been reluctant to meet increased demand for their products by adding new employees to their payrolls.” It is not clear, she added, whether these patterns will continue.
Further, analysts said the latest figures emphasize the continued plight of the long-term unemployed and those whose jobs have been wiped out in the current economic slowdown. The figures are a reflection, they said, of some underlying problems with the nation’s economic recovery.
As of last month, about one out of five of the nation’s unemployed were jobless for more than 27 weeks, a rate that has barely changed in the last year, according to government statistics.
The average unemployed person has been out of work for 18 weeks, a figure that has not changed greatly in the last year. Similarly, more than half the unemployed in October said they did not expect to return to their jobs.
In the depth of the nation’s recession in the early 1980s, only a slightly higher number of workers were considered permanent job losers, according to government officials.
Many of these job losers are older, white-collar workers hurt by steep cuts in various industries, said Swonk.
