The unemployment rate fell in March to 8.8% according to the Employment Situation Report. 216,000 jobs were added on a seasonally adjusted basis, above the “sustainability” rates of both Bernanke and Reich. This was safely inside the rather wide Bloomberg consensus range of 150,000 to 310,000.

If you want to feel particularly good about this news, consider that this is a down-revision month; 925,000 jobs were added on an unadjusted basis. 117,000 of those are due to the adjustments from the Birth/Death model, but the rest correspond to the establishment survey.

Table A-15 provides alternative measures of labor utilization. U-6, sometimes referred to as the “actual” unemployment rate, fell from 15.9% to 15.7% on an adjusted basis and grew from 16.7% to 16.2% on an unadjusted basis.

This was a solid report (typical for a March). Given how long it’s been since the bottom in employment, though, I would like to see temporary help services somewhere other than the top of the list. The only categories that produced more growth were health care and professional and technical services. Of course, professional and technical services is more than 3x the size of temporary help (health care is more than 6x the size of temp), so on a percentage basis, temp workers are still growing faster. This was acceptable when we thought the jobs market was just turning around. Now, I’m finding fewer reasons to celebrate.