Should American Workers Celebrate This News?

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Released amid ongoing fears that the recent federal budget cuts — resulting from a Congressional impasse — will increase the number of unemployed in the coming months, the Labor Department’s Employment Situation report showed Friday that the pace of hiring has accelerated. In each of the past four months, employers added, on average, 190,000 positions to their payrolls. But in the month of February, job additions soared to 236,000, pushing down unemployment to 7.7 percent.

The current rate of unemployment is the nation’s lowest since December 2008.

After unemployment hit a peak at 10 percent in October 2009, the jobless rate has slowly dropped for the past three years. But it has been stuck just under 8 percent since last September. While an unemployment rate of 7.7 percent still reflects an economy in the midst of an incomplete recovery, the reported numbers were much higher than analysts had expected. Economists had estimated that the economy would add just 165,000 jobs in February…