If the economy is slowing down, nobody told the labor market.
Employers added 275,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, in another month to exceed expectations after January’s surprising surge. The unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent.
The repeat performance is additional evidence that four years after the start of the pandemic, America’s jobs engine is nowhere near running out of steam.
“We’ve been expecting a slowdown in the labor market, a more material loosening in conditions, but we’re just not seeing that,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at High Frequency Economics.
Six months ago, economists predicted much more modest employment growth, with hiring concentrated in a few industries. But while some pandemic-inflated industries have shed jobs, expected downturns in sectors like construction haven’t materialized. Rising wages, attractive benefits and more flexible work schedules have drawn millions of workers off the sidelines, with elevated levels of immigration adding to the labor supply.
That doesn’t mean the employment landscape looks rosy to everyone. Employee confidence, as measured by the company rating website Glassdoor, has been falling steadily as layoffs by tech and media companies have grabbed headlines. That’s especially true in white-collar professions like human relations and consulting, while those in professions that require working in person — such as health care, construction and manufacturing — are more upbeat.
“It is a two-track labor market,” said Aaron Terrazas, Glassdoor’s chief economist. “For skilled workers in risk-intensive industries, anyone who’s been laid off is having a hard time finding new jobs, whereas if you’re a blue-collar or frontline service worker, it’s still competitive.”
The last few months have been studded with strong economic data, leading analysts surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics to raise their forecasts for gross domestic product and lower their expectations for the trajectory of unemployment. It’s occurred even as inflation has eased, leading the Federal Reserve to telegraph its plans for interest rate cuts sometime this year, which has raised growth expectations further.
Mervin Jebaraj, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, helped tabulate the survey responses. He said the mood was buoyed partly by fading trepidation over federal government shutdowns and draconian budget cuts, after several close calls since the fall. And he sees no obvious reason for the recovery to end soon.
“Once it starts going, it keeps going,” Mr. Jebaraj said. “You had this external stimulus with all the trillions of dollars of government spending, Now it’s sort of self-sustaining, even though the money’s gone.”
