Jared Bernstein Jobs Quotations

Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

Given the growth of the population and labor force and improvements in productivity, we need to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs per month to nudge unemployment down.

Our expectations have been pretty diminished. A good month used to be 300,000 more jobs and now it is 200,000.

This report shows a race between factors boosting net worth such as home ownership and factors pushing the other way such as weak wage growth. Unless we start to see better income growth from jobs and wages, it is hard to see major gains in net worth for the typical family.

You need to create ever more jobs in order to absorb increases in the labor force as well as productivity gains.

As jobs become more available, people are no longer finding themselves stuck as long in unemployment.

(The) 43,000 new jobs is much too small a number to lower the unemployment number. The unemployment report underscores that the recovery is off to a slow start. The Fed will most certainly not raise (interest) rates in the near-term.

There were close to 200,000 jobs cut in the past couple of months, making them the worst two months of last year. The jobless recovery is not only lingering, it's deepening.

Of course there are jobs that few Americans will take because the wages and working conditions have been so degraded by employers. But there is nothing about landscaping, food processing, meat cutting or construction that would preclude someone from doing these jobs on the basis of their nativity. Nothing would keep anyone, immigrant or native born, from doing them if they paid better, if they had health care.

As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly.