223,000 jobs added in April, Labor Department reports

Employers' payrolls nationwide grew by 223,000 people in April, while the unemployment rate dropped slightly from 5.5 percent the previous month to 5.4 percent, the lowest rate since May 2008, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday.

Employment improved in most sectors in April, including construction, manufacturing, government, financial, education, health services, hospitality, and retail.

Employers are looking to hire, said Joanie Courtney, a senior vice president who heads online jobs board company Monster.com's market insight department. "We should start to see some stronger growth through the rest of this year," she said.

Maybe that will bode well for JaQuan Blackwell, 17, an unemployed high school junior from West Philadelphia. "Subway, RiteAid," he said, describing where he planned to apply for work.

Teen unemployment is high compared with other age groups, although the official definition of unemployment is the same for all groups. The government considers someone unemployed if that person, whether a teenager or a senior citizen, looked for a job in the previous month and didn't find one.

The Labor Department also revised March's payroll numbers downward to 85,000 - making March's relatively poor showing of 126,000 jobs even worse.

"It is now clear that poor weather affected the labor market in March significantly," said Doug Handler, chief economist for IHS Global Insight, an economics firm based in Colorado.

"Construction employment fell in March, but rebounded in April. The April gain of 45,000 [construction] jobs contributed about a third of the swing between March and April," Handler said in a statement.

"Another significant piece of the weather-driven rebound can be traced to restaurants and bars, with 26,000 jobs gained following a down month in March," he said. "A similar down-up pattern occurred in the building and dwelling services category, where the weather can influence hours worked."

According to the Labor Department report, April saw declines in mining, including gas extraction, and in support activities related to mining as oil prices fell.

Even though the manufacturing sector overall added jobs, food manufacturing declined nationwide, by 2,400 positions.

More than 8.5 million people were unemployed in April, down slightly from March, with 2.5 million of them unemployed for more than six months.

A year ago, in April, the economy finally generated enough jobs to catch up to payroll employment levels at the start of the recession, in December 2007. And the jobless rate has declined sharply from 6.2 percent in April 2014.

But the economy has yet to add enough jobs to obliterate the deficit. That's because each month, the economy has to add about 100,000 jobs just to keep up with population growth.

It has been 89 months since the recession began, and in that time, an additional 8.9 million jobs would have been needed to break even. As of April, a deficit of 5.9 million jobs remained.

"Wages continue to be the unfinished business of the recovery," U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said in a statement that touted economic progress.

"Wage growth has been picking up, with the average hourly wage increasing by 2.2 percent over the last year," Perez said. "But too many working people are still earning poverty wages."

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said Republican solutions to improve the economy, such as efforts to increase trade opportunities, have helped improve the jobs market.

"While the economy continues to show some signs of improvement, too many middle-class families are struggling just to get by," Boehner said in a statement. "Too many Americans remain out of work, and too many are working harder only to lose ground to stagnant wages and rising costs.

Adam Ozimek, an economist from Moody's Analytics in West Chester, had a different take.

"I think the thing many commentators miss is that fast employment growth and low wage growth is what we want," he said. "To paraphrase Augustine: Give us wage growth, but not yet."

When wages rise significantly, he said, it will be a sign that the nation has returned to a full-employment economy, in which most people who want jobs have them and employers need to increase wages to attract workers.

But, he said, the number of unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged people indicates the economy hasn't yet reached that point. The number of jobs, low-wage or not, must increase to diminish unemployment, he said.