U.S. employers added 192,000 jobs in March, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
Earlier estimates had put March’s jobs numbers at around 200,000.
The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the adult, non-military and non-jailed population that is currently employed or actively seeking work, increased to 12.7 percent, up from its earlier read of 12.6 percent.
Meanwhile, the labor force participation rate increased slightly to 63.2 percent, a 35-year low:
The latest numbers on unemployment come when the United States Federal Reserve continues to question how best to wean itself off of its quantitative easing policies. The Fed announced in December it would drawdown its $85 billion monthly purchases of Treasurys and Treasury mortgage-backed securities by $5 billion each starting in January.
Professional and business services, health care and mining and logging were the main beneficiaries of job growth in March, according to Friday’s report.
Further, according to the BLS, the employment-population (58.9 percent) ratio was unchanged in March.
Here’s unemployment broken up by group:
At 3.7 million, the number of the long-term unemployed (i.e. people who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more) continued its small decline March, according to the report.
The number has come down 837,000 so far in 2014.
Meanwhile, the number of persons “marginally attached” to the labor force in March decreased to 2.2 million, down from its previous posting of 2.3 million.
"These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months,” the BLS reported. “They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”
It continues:
Among the marginally attached, there were 698,000 discouraged workers in March, down slightly from a year earlier … Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.5 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in March had not searched for work for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.
Markets are poised to trade lower following Friday’s jobs report:
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This post has been updated.
