February employment

February's employment numbers were released this morning. BLS reported that employment was up but so was the unemployment rate. According to the New York Times:

The gain of 262,000 jobs in February was stronger than the increase of 225,000 positions that economists were forecasting before the release of the employment report. Payroll growth in February was up from January's sluggish gain of 132,000, which was less than the 146,000 increase initialy reported.

The rise in the overall civilian unemployment rate to 5.4 percent in February was up from 5.2 percent in January. The increase last month came in part as more jobseekers streamed back into the market.

The BLS numbers included general data on occupations. A quick look at the breakdown shows what we all know: those in the professional occupations have lower rates of unemployment that manufacturing and service workers.

Management, business, and financial operations occupations:
below average unemployment rate (2.6 %); but up slighly from Feb 2004

Professional and related occupations:
below average (2.4 %); down significantly from Feb 2004

Service occupations:
above average (7.0 %); down significantly from Feb 2004

Sales and related occupations:
average (5.5 %); down significantly from Feb 2004

Office and administrative support occupations:
average (5.1 %); up slightly from Feb 2004

Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations:
significantly above average (10.8 %); down significantly from Feb 2004

Construction and extraction occupations:
significantly above average (12.2 %); up slightly from Feb 2004

Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations:
slightly below average (4.6 %); same as Feb 2004

Production occupations:
above average (7.5 %); down slightly from Feb 2004

Transportation and material moving occupations:
above average (7.2 %); down significantly from Feb 2004

Unfortunately, we don't have detailed data on monthly changes in occupations. We have annual data at a little finer grain and much more detailed data from November 2003 (released in November 2004).

It would be interesting to see the monthly trends (as well as the annual trends) of those workers who specialize in intangibles.