U.S. Adds Only 88,000 Jobs - Jobless Rate Falls to 7.6% - NYTimes.com

U.S. Adds Only 88,000 Jobs - Jobless Rate Falls to 7.6% - NYTimes.com: "For the 30th straight month, the United States economy added jobs in March, albeit still at a pace too sluggish to put a big dent in the backlog of 11.7 million idle workers.

The nation’s employers increased their payrolls by 88,000 last month, compared with 268,000 in February, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. The unemployment rate, which comes from a different survey, ticked down to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent.

The slight decrease in the unemployment rate occurred not because more unemployed people got jobs, but because the number of people active in the labor force — i.e., working or looking for work — fell. The labor force participation rate has not been this low since 1979, when it was also 63.3 percent, at a time when women were less likely to be working. Baby Boomer retirements may account for part of the slide, but discouragement about job prospects in a mediocre economy still seems to be playing a large role, economists say."

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