April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added; Unemployment At 4.4 Percent

The U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. The number is a sharp rebound from March, when fewer than 100,000 jobs were created.

Both the national unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, saw only incremental changes last month, according to the bureau. By falling from 4.5 percent to 4.4 percent, the unemployment rate remains at low levels that were last seen in 2007, before the recession hit.

Breaking down the results by ethnicity, the BLS says the unemployment rate for black workers has dipped below 8 percent, after standing at nearly 9 percent one year ago. Hispanic workers were at 5.2 percent unemployment, down from more than 6 percent in April of 2016.

"The labor force participation rate, at 62.9 percent, changed little in April and has shown little movement over the past year," the Labor Department agency says.

American job results from March of 2017 are now even worse than when they first came out. While the BLS initially reported a paltry gain of 98,000 jobs, the figure has now been revised downward to 79,000.

In another revision, the February figure was bumped up to 232,000 from 219,000. Together, the revisions represent 6,000 fewer jobs than had been reported.

In the new jobs report that came out Friday morning, some of the biggest gains came in leisure and hospitality, health care and social assistance, financial activities, and mining.

"Over the year, the unemployment rate has declined by 0.6 percentage point, and the number of unemployed has fallen by 854,000," the Bureau of Labor Statistics says.

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