The manufacturing sector lost 4,000 jobs, and hiring in the mining sector, which includes oil and gas production, was essentially flat.
The United States health care sector added 44,000 jobs last month, according to the March jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Areas of the nation's labor market that are key to the Houston area were stung by job losses last month even as the U.S. economy continues to add more jobs than expected.
But the health care sector, a large source of employment in Houston, added 44,000 jobs last month, 19,000 of them at hospitals. And the region is likely to be mostly unscathed by recent layoffs in the tech sector, which has a growing but relatively small footprint in the region. State and local jobs data will be released next week.
Nonfarm payrolls swelled by 311,000 in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly jobs report. Economists had expected more measured growth, of perhaps 205,000 jobs. Notable gains came from the leisure and hospitality sector, which added 105,000 jobs; retail, which added 50,000; and government, which added 46,000.
The labor report all but guarantees that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again when it meets this month, a prospect that helped put the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and NASDAQ stock exchange in a pessimistic mood Friday morning, along with the collapse of California-based Silicon Valley Bank.Gus Faucher, chief economist of the PNC Financial Services Group, reckons the Fed might go for a 0.5 percent hike this time, after opting for a quarter-point increase in February.
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