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Reply to "Good news about jobs and wages"

There's good news, and there's bad news.
The Headline says 180 thousand jobs added. It does not say that 56 thousand of them are in the Construction Sector.

"There's been worry that housing troubles would seep into the rest of the economy and hurt jobs but that is not happening now," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hanco*k Financial Services. "This says employers are finding that they need people and when they need people they hire them."

The real estate market is about as soft as a baby's backside. That is not good news.

"Construction companies, after suffering heavy job losses in February in part due to lousy winter weather, bulked up in March. They added 56,000 positions last month, the most in just over a year. Retailers added nearly 36,000 jobs last month. Education and health care services expanded employment by 54,000. Leisure and hospitality picked up 21,000 new jobs, while the government added 23,000."
Retailers added 36 thousand jobs. If the construction workers keep their new jobs, so will the retail clerks.

"Workers' wages grew modestly . . .
Average hourly earnings rose to $17.22 in March, a 0.3 percent increase from February. That matched economists' expectations. Over the last 12 months, wages grew by 4 percent."
Annual Inflation is trending up, and is about 3.5% at the moment.

The result of full employment, and sluggish wage gains relative to inflation has had a consequence.
"Tapping into that (worker) discontent, Democrats are championing policies to close the gap between low- and high-income workers, make it easier for workers to form unions against company wishes and taking a harder stance with respect to the Bush administration's free-trade deals."

Full employment, with slow wage growth and inflation is what cost Jimmy Carter a second term.
"Economists predict the economy will remain in a sluggish spell in the months ahead. For the recently ended January-to-March quarter, some analysts are predicting growth will clock in at close to 2 percent, which would represent a further slowing from the 2.5 percent growth rate logged in the final three months of last year."

The experts don't agree,
"Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believes the economy is working its way through a soft patch and won't fall into a recession this year. However, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan has put the odds of the economy sliding into a recession this year at one-in-three."

Headlines are written by the EDITOR, not the reporter. If all you read is headlines, all you see is the "opinion" of what the story means,

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