U.S. Adds 216,000 Jobs in March 2011
Posted by Ted C. Jones on April 4, 2011
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At the Current Growth Rate, However, It Will Take More Than Five Years to Get Back to the Effective Employment Level Seen in March 2001.
Good news is that the U.S. has finally commenced growing jobs. March 2011 saw 216,000 net new additional jobs.
Bad news is that since January 1, 2008, the country is still down 7.41 million jobs. At the current job growth rate, it would take more than 34 months to get back to where the country was at the beginning of 2008.
With an estimated 132.5 million jobs in March 2001, the U.S. now has 1.76 million fewer jobs than 10 years ago. Worse news is that the U.S. needs to add a minimum 100,000 net new additional jobs every month just to maintain an equivalent employment rate (as a minimum 100,000 net new additional people enter the workforce every month). Thus, during the last 10 years when the U.S. needed to add 12 million jobs just to maintain the same relative level of employment, the U.S. lost 1.76 million jobs. This means that we need to add 12 million jobs plus the 1.76 million jobs, or 13.8 million new positions. At the current rate of 216,000 new jobs per month, it would take more than 63 months (five years plus) just to get back to effective March 2001 employment levels.
The following graph illustrates the percent change in the total number of jobs from the same month in the prior year. These data, however, are based on data that are not seasonally adjusted, while the two previous graphs are seasonally adjusted data.
The bottom line is that job growth is good news, but it will take years to return to the level of effective employment seen a decade ago or even the level seen in January 2008. While the trajectory is finally positive, the time of recovery is years out.
