The unemployment rate held steady in February’s Employment Situation Report. On a seasonally adjusted basis, 36,000 jobs were lost. On an unadjusted basis, 473,000 jobs were added. The Bloomberg consensus range for the adjusted number was quite large, ranging from -150,000 to 30,000. From the report:

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment fell in construction and information, while temporary help services added jobs. Severe winter weather in parts of the country may have affected payroll employment and hours; however, it is not possible to quantify precisely the net impact of the winter storms on these measures. For more information on the effects of the severe weather on employment estimates, see the box note at the end of the release.

…

Construction employment fell by 64,000 in February, about in line with the average monthly job loss over the prior 6 months. Job losses were concentrated in nonresidential building (-10,000) and among nonresidential specialty trade contractors (-35,000). Since December 2007, employment in construction has fallen by 1.9 million.

Employment in the information industry dropped by 18,000 in February. Since December 2007, job losses in information have totaled 297,000. In February, employment in transportation and warehousing continued to trend down.

Employment in manufacturing was essentially unchanged in February. Small job gains in a number of component industries were offset by job losses in motor vehicles and parts and in chemicals.

Retail trade employment was unchanged in February, after a sizeable increase in January. Over the month, job gains in building material and garden supply stores (7,000) and in department stores (6,000) were offset by declines in food and beverage stores (-9,000).

In February, temporary help services added 48,000 jobs. Since reaching a low point in September 2009, temporary help services employment has risen by 284,000. Health care employment continued to trend upward in February.

In February, employment in the federal government edged up. The hiring of 15,000 temporary workers for Census 2010 was partially offset by a decline in U.S. Postal Service employment.

I do want to point out that those numbers are all seasonally adjusted. It seems silly to talk about “sizeable” increases in retail jobs in January when 500,000 jobs were lost, as opposed to saying “fewer jobs than usual were lost.” I also find it interesting that the seasonal adjustment halved the number of census jobs. Either the census hiring is seasonally anticipated, in which case it should have been zero, or it’s non-seasonal, and the whole number should be used.

On an unadjusted basis, the biggest jobs changes occurred in education and health services (247k), government (399k, almost entirely state and local, not federal), and retail trade (-168k).

The alternative measures of labor underutilization can be found in table A-15. U-6, the broadest measure of unemployment, crept up from 16.5% to 16.8% (unadjusted, it decreased from 18% to 17.9%). This is often cited as the “real” unemployment rate.

Now for the weather. The BLS released a statement including a discussion about the weather’s impact on unemployment:

In the establishment survey, workers who do not receive any pay for the entire pay period are not counted as employed. Therefore, it is possible that the storms had some negative impact on payroll employment. However, not every closure or temporary absence causes a drop in employment. Workers are counted as employed in the establishment survey if they are paid for a single hour during the reference pay period, whether they worked or not. Also, half of all workers have bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly pay periods. I would assume that most of them worked during the part of the pay period that preceded or followed the snow events. In addition, we do not know how many workers may have been added to payrolls for snow removal, cleanup, and repairs due to the storms. Nor do we know how new hiring or separations were affected by the weather. For those reasons, we cannot say how much February’s payroll employment was affected by the severe weather.

In our household survey, persons with a job who miss work for weather-related events are counted as employed whether or not they are paid for the time off.

At Bloomberg, an article points out that historically, changes from such storms are quite small.

This report wasn’t particularly bad (many consider it good). The employment situation, on the other hand, is still terrible. The only sectors to add jobs over the last year are education and health services and the federal government. Every other private and government sector shows job losses over the year. Since our working population is estimated to expand at roughly 125,000 a month, there’s a significant hole to dig ourselves out of. With 7 in 10 boomers putting off retirement for financial reasons, that trend won’t reverse easily.