US financial system provides 228,000 jobs in March forward of Trump’s commerce battle
The U.S. economy added 228,000 jobs in March just as President Donald Trump’s announcement of across-the-board tariffs have sent the economy into free fall.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the unemployment rate jumped from 4.1 percent in February to 4.2 percent in March. The labor force participation rate, which accounts for the number of people who either have a job or are looking for one, jumped 0.1 percent from 62.4 percent to 62.5 percent.
The White House touted the positive jobs report in a statement on Friday morning.
“The economy is starting to roar with a strong 228,000 jobs added in the month of March — well ahead of the market’s expectation,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The President’s push to onshore jobs here in the United States is working. The Golden Age of America is on its way!”
The White House specifically celebrated the increase in transportation andwarehousing, which grew by 23,000 jobs in March. But it also said that construction employment increased, even though the report showed that the number of construction jobs changed little.
The report also showed that the health care sector added 54,000 jobs, while social assistance jobs jumped by increased by 24,000 jobs.
Hourly earnings rose by 0.3 percent and wages as a whole rose by 3.8 percent.
But the report also showed that federal government jobs dropped by 4,000 jobs in March, which comes after the federal government saw a job loss of 11,000 in February.
This comes as the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has laid off numerous federal employees and Trump has sought to close the US Department of Education unilaterally without an act of Congress. But the report said that did not account for people who are on paid leave or who had received severance pay, who are counted as employed in the survey.
March saw the highest number of layoffs since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, largely driven by DOGE.
In addition to the March report, the bureau revised down the number of jobs added in February from 151,000 to 117,000, a difference of 34,000 jobs. It also revised down the number of jobs added in January from 125,000 to 111,000 jobs, a difference of 14,000.
The jobs numbers account for the month of March, which ended two days before Trump announced his “Liberation Day,” wherein he announced a 10 percent minimum tariffs on goods coming into the United States.
And that does not account for countries like China, which would have a total effective tariff of 54 percent, or Taiwan, which would have a tariff of 32 percent. On Friday, China announced that it would slap a 34 percent tariff on all US goods.
The announcement caused stocks to tumble on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 1,679 points and the NASDAQ 1,050 points, its largest one-day drop.
The president has said that this would force companies to make manufacturing jobs return to the United States. But economists have consistently said that the cost of tariffs will fall directly to the consumer.
-Ariana Baio contributed reporting
Source: independent.co.uk
