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Finally, more jobs
Latest economic report shows first U.S. gains in eight months
Sam Zuckerman, Chronicle Economics Writer
Friday, March 8, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/03/08/MN91377.DTL

In the latest sign that the recovery is gathering steam, the nation's economy added jobs in February for the first time in eight months.

Across the country, employers added 66,000 workers to their payrolls last month, the first increase since July and the largest gain since February 2001, the Labor Department reported today. The national unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 5.5 percent from 5.6 percent.

The improvement in the labor market comes amid mounting evidence that the nation's year-old recession is over.

A steady stream of statistics is showing growth in such varied indicators as consumer spending, productivity and factory orders.

And yesterday, the nation's chief economic policymaker, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, told Congress that the recession is effectively over.

"The economy is in full recovery," said Donald Grimes, an economist with the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan.

Still, Grimes cautioned, the rebound may not be strong enough to prevent the unemployment rate from rising in the months ahead. February's increase "is still a relatively small gain. The job market will get better, but probably pretty slowly," he said.

Employment data for California won't be released until next week. But experts said that even in the Bay Area, laid low by the crash of the technology sector, the job market is beginning to stir.

"I'm seeing people go after contract jobs and having more success," said Patti Wilson, a Los Gatos employment counselor. "People are starting to get nibbles on their resumes and they're actually getting interviews."

All the same, the regional job market remains exceptionally weak, Wilson warned. "There are a lot more people out there than there are positions," she noted.

Oakland resident Gwyneth Iredale landed a job in February after pounding the pavement -- or whatever the online equivalent of the shoe-leather route is -- for eight months. After she lost her job last June as licensing director at a San Francisco company that produced online animated cartoons, she went about systematically looking for work.

"I spent six hours a day, four days a week on the Internet and cold-calling, " Iredale said. "Nobody was hiring."

A few weeks ago, Iredale, 44, went to a jobs event and noticed a Web company named Acteva that arranged online registration for conferences, trade shows and the like. Acteva's Internet site said the company was hiring sales people. What happened next took place at Internet speed.

"I sent an e-mail Wednesday. Thursday, they called me and asked me to come in Friday. On Friday, they hired me at the end of the interview," Iredale said.

She started on March 1, a week later.

Iredale's story isn't entirely happy. Her base pay is small and her income will depend largely on commissions. After earning about $100,000 annually at her previous job, she expects to take in about two-thirds that in her new position.

Still, she is thrilled to be working again. She attributes her success in finding work to well-honed sales skills and sheer doggedness. "I forced myself to be optimistic," she said.

Nationwide, February's job picture represented a huge turnaround from previous months. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the national economy had shed more than one million jobs. After falling below 4 percent in 2000, the U.S. unemployment rate reached a high of 5.8 percent in December.

While February's job gain was welcome news, labor experts said the job market is still far from healthy. "The pace of job growth was very weak in the private sector," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington, D.C. think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Private sector employers, he noted, added 42,000 jobs in February, which wasn't enough to offset an upward revision of 44,000 to total job losses in January. In addition, the number of people forced to work part time jumped by 217,000 last month.

The performances of the factory and service sectors continued to diverge in February. Manufacturing shed jobs as it did throughout the entire recession, while employment increased in retail, construction, business services and health care.

February's numbers may have been slightly distorted by the process of adjusting the data for seasonal variations. Employers didn't hire as many seasonal workers during the holiday season late last year and therefore didn't lay off as many people as usual in January and February.

That resulted in an unusually high gain for retail workers in February after making the seasonal adjustment.

E-mail Sam Zuckerman at szuckerman@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.   Page A - 1