August private job growth outweighed by public job losses

Despite big cuts in temporary government jobs, the nation lost fewer nonfarm jobs overall than expected last month - 54,000. And the private sector gained 67,000 jobs, the eighth straight month that that number has increased.

The modest pace of private-sector growth was not enough to overcome the loss of 121,000 government jobs that was mostly due to the layoff of temporary census workers, according to a federal report released Friday. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected the overall job loss to be twice what it was.

The private sector is considered the best gauge of a job market's health. And one local economist said the patient is still ailing.

"The feeble job growth continues to worry me," said Gregory DeFreitas, a professor of economics at Hofstra University who heads the labor studies program there. "After all this stimulus money the private sector is taking so long to respond and leaving too much of the job up to the federal government."

In fact in the past eight months, the private sector has added 763,000 jobs, compared with more than 8 million jobs lost since the recession, considered the worst downturn since the Great Depression, began in December 2007.

"While the good news is that the private sector for eight months has been creating jobs, [it's] too few jobs to get us out of this mess," DeFreitas said.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent last month from 9.5 percent in July.

Other parts of the report indicated how distressed the job market continues to be. The number of people employed part time because they couldn't find full-time jobs rose 331,000 last month to 8.9 million. And the number of discouraged workers, those who have given up finding work, rose to 1.1 million, up 352,000 from a year earlier.

Some Long Islanders know firsthand how challenging this job market has been. Garden City resident Gregory Senken, 54, has been out of work for about a year and a half.

He was a managing director of a real-estate services firm and was earning six figures when he lost his job in a downsizing in March 2009. He has since worked as a part-time consultant, when he has work. He said he averages two hours on the phone every day networking.

"I have been in the real estate business for 30 years," he said. "I have seen some ups and downs in the industry in terms of employment, but this period of time has been the absolute worst I have ever seen."

For Babylon resident Carla Quatraro-D'arcy, 35, even a part-time job would be welcome. She lost her six-figure job as a product developer at a Manhattan fashion accessories company more than two years ago. Except for a temporary data-entry job that she worked from November until April of this year, she has been unemployed.

She said she sends out resumes weekly but "if you get one call back in a two-month time frame, you're lucky," she said.

The report did have some other bright spots, including the number of long-term unemployed, or those jobless for at least 27 weeks. That number declined by 323,000 last month, to 6.2 million.

Among the sectors adding the most jobs, health care expanded by 28,000. Among the biggest losers besides government, manufacturing lost 27,000 jobs after months of increases that help lead private-sector job growth.