The US recorded strong jobs growth in March as higher wages lured more workers back to the labour force, giving the Federal Reserve another data point supporting more aggressive monetary policy to tame inflation.
Employers in the world’s largest economy added 431,000 jobs last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a cooler pace than the upwardly revised 750,000 positions created in February and less than Bloomberg’s consensus forecast of 490,000 jobs, but still a substantive increase in a tight labour market.
For the first quarter of 2022, job growth averaged 562,000 per month, in line with 2021. The unemployment rate plummeted to 3.6 per cent, a 0.2 percentage point drop from February and the lowest level since before the pandemic.