The nation's longest job slump since the Depression ended last month when U.S. employers hired enough new workers to boost total payrolls above what they were before the 2001 recession.
The nation's unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent in January -- the lowest level since September 2001 -- from 5.4 percent in December, the Labor Department reported yesterday.
Job growth, however, has slowed in recent months. And the unemployment rate dropped primarily because many people stopped working or looking for jobs, the data showed.
That caused the share of the eligible adult population participating in the labor force to slip to 65.8 percent -- the lowest since May 1988 -- from 66 percent in December. The participation rate reached an all-time high of 67.3 percent in early 2000, at the height of the economic boom that preceded the recession.
Economists have debated the causes of the decline in the participation rate. One explanation offered is that many employers have eliminated traditional factory jobs permanently, rather than laying off workers temporarily in expectation of hiring them back when demand rebounds. Many former assembly-line workers are unqualified for the higher-skilled new jobs being created in a more service-oriented economy. Some of these workers have dropped out of the labor force -- and therefore are not counted among the unemployed -- because they have gone back to school for retraining.
A growing number of people over the past year also said they had given up looking because they were discouraged about the likelihood of finding work, the Labor Department said. Others said they stopped seeking employment for a variety of reasons, including family commitments or illness.
Some categories of workers had a harder time than others finding work. The unemployment rate for white workers fell to 4.4 percent in January, from 4.6 percent in December; but the rate for blacks remained more than twice as high, slipping to 10.6 percent from 10.8 percent; the Latino rate fell to 6.1 percent from 6.6 percent.
Workers with less education continued to have higher unemployment rates than the better-educated.
These and other details depict a labor market that continues to improve, but more slowly than in any post-recession period since the department began keeping records in 1939, economists said.
"January was another month of soft payroll growth for the U.S. economy," said Peter E. Kretzmer, senior economist at Bank of America Corp. "This almost four-year period of no net job growth illustrates just how delayed and soft the rebound in employment has been in the current expansion."
