Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in April


The American economy added 288,000 new jobs in March, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at 198,000. The headline unemployment rate plummeted from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent.

This is a decent result except for one thing: the unemployment rate went down because a ton of people dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted in the totals. Nearly a million people dropped out, causing the labor force participation rate to plunge from 63.2 percent in March to 62.8 percent in April. The participation data is fairly volatile on a monthly basis—it went up 0.4 points during the first three months of the year and then dropped 0.4 points in April—but this is nonetheless a large and disconcerting decline that puts a serious damper on the otherwise good unemployment news.

Why? Well, some of the decline in the participation rate is just due to older workers retiring, but probably not that much of it. Rather, the BLS suggests that it’s mostly due to an unusual dip in the number of new entrants to the labor force, which is hardly good news. In addition, I suspect a big chunk of it is due to unemployed workers who have given up looking for jobs, though I acknowledge that the data doesn’t support this.

So: a mixed result. The jobs number is fairly decent. The labor force number is troubling. We’re still puttering along, but not much more.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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