U.S. economy added 266,000 jobs in April, widely missing expectations

May 7 (UPI) — The U.S. economy added a little more than 260,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday in its monthly workforce assessment — a figure that missed economists’ projections by a wide margin.

The department said 266,000 jobs were added for the month and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.1%.

The figure wasn’t even close to experts’ predictions. Most analysts expected the report to show between 970,000 and 1 million new jobs for the month and the unemployment rate to dip below 6%.

Friday’s report also revised down March’s job growth from 916,000 to 770,000.

President Joe Biden said Friday he believes the economy is moving in the right direction, but added “it is clear we have a long way to go.”

In remarks from the East Room of the White House, Biden noted that the United States is still digging out of an “economic collapse” that cost more than 22 million jobs.

He said his American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill that provided $1,400 stimulus payments to many Americans, is working. Some provisions of the package, though, are still in their early stages.

“We are moving more rapidly than I thought we would,” he said.

Biden said since he took office in January, the economy has added 1.5 million new jobs and the jobs created in his first three months were more than there were over the same period of any other presidency.

Most economists said before the report that they also expected to see more than 1 million new jobs in each of the next few months as more Americans are vaccinated against COVID-19 and return to the workforce.

ADP and Moody’s Analytics reported in their private assessment Wednesday about 740,000 new jobs in April.

The U.S. economy still has a lot of ground to make up to return to prepandemic labor levels. There were about 8.4 million fewer jobs in March than in the pre-COVID-19 levels before February 2020.
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