U.S. hiring cools

U.S. hiring slowed to a near-standstill in February, with employers adding 50,000 jobs and the unemployment rate at 4.4%. (financialcontent.com) That 4.4% jobless rate was the highest since late 2021, and the 50,000 payroll gain was the weakest monthly increase of the post-2020 recovery. (markets.financialcontent.com) The official March report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics then showed a rebound: nonfarm payrolls rose 178,000 and unemployment edged down to 4.3% on April 3. Health care, construction, and transportation and warehousing led the gains, while federal government employment kept falling. (bls.gov) That split is the point of the story. February looked weak, March looked better, but both reports fit a labor market that is still adding jobs more slowly than it did in 2024 and earlier in the recovery. (bls.gov) Another federal report pointed the same way. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed 6.882 million openings in February, down from 7.24 million in January, while hires fell to their lowest level since 2020. (bls.gov) Workers are also quitting less. Indeed Hiring Lab said the quits rate was 1.9% in February and had been at or below 2.0% for eight straight months, a sign that employees see fewer easy alternatives. (hiringlab.org) Federal Reserve officials have been watching that “low hire, low fire” pattern closely because it means companies are not cutting deeply, but they are not expanding much either. The St. Louis Federal Reserve said lower job separations were a main reason unemployment dipped to 4.3% in March. (stlouisfed.org) Wage growth has cooled too. Average hourly earnings rose 0.2% in March from the prior month and 3.5% from a year earlier, the slowest annual increase since May 2021. (cnbc.com) Economists are now parsing whether the slowdown stays orderly or turns into outright weakness. For now, the data show a labor market that has not collapsed, but is no longer generating jobs at the pace that once masked softer hiring underneath. (bls.gov)