from Yahoo Finance:
April may be the cruelest month, but when it comes to the job market, let's hope it's better than March. Employers cut 663,000 jobs from their payrolls last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The unemployment rate--the slice of able workers who are unemployed but looking for work--charged up 0.4 percentage point to 8.5 percent. Two-thirds of this recession's 5.1 million job losses have occurred in the last five months, and 86,000 more jobs were lost in January than previously reported.
The worst news first. The report indicates a steep drop in hours worked. The average workweek fell 0.1 hour to 33.2 hours--the lowest level since the figure started being recorded in 1964. "The average work week is considered to be a leading indicator of labor demand," according to Ted Wieseman and David Greenlaw of Morgan Stanley Research. "So, the ongoing weakness does not auger well for a turnaround in employment growth anytime soon."
It was also pretty disheartening to see a job loss of 741,000 in January, rather than the 655,000 originally reported. The earlier numbers indicated that the worst of the payroll cuts came at the tail end of 2008. Now it's clear that the ugliest month so far has been in the new year. One additional point to keep in mind: The government measures not only the unemployed who are looking for work, but also unemployed workers who want jobs but have stopped looking, and those who are working part-time but want full-time work. The measure of all those groups reached 15.6 percent this month, a steep jump from a 9.1 percent measure in March 2008.
