Thumbs Up: Temp work rises.

"Jobs
Report: Deets the Markets Care About" from the Wall Street Journal

As you may know
already, the February
jobs report was better
than expected, with the unemployment rate standing pat at 9.7%



Of course, the February numbers require a bit of digging. Here are some of the
details from the report that the markets will care about.



Job count: Better than we thought, -36,000, expectation was for -75,000.



Temp workers: Added 48,000 jobs. Since reaching a low point in September 2009,
temporary help services employment has risen by 284,000.



Impact of the February snowstorms, from the release: "Severe winter weather in
parts of the

country may have affected payroll employment and hours; however, it is not
possible to quantify precisely the net impact of the winter storms on these
measures."



Revisions: On the whole, they were good. December was revised from -150,000 to
-109,000,

and the change for January was revised from -20,000 to -26,000.



Average workweek length: Not great, for all employees it fell by 0.1 hour to
33.8 hours in February.



U-6: The broadest measure of unemployment, rose to 16.8% after a decline in
January brought it to 16.5%.



Median duration of unemployment: A bit of good news here. Seasonally adjusted
fell to 19.4 weeks vs. 19.9 weeks in January.



Participation rate: Essentially flat, was 64.7% in January, and it inched up to
64.8% in February.



Long-term unemployed: Few signs of improvement. "The number of long-term
unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.1 million in February
and has been about that level since December. About 4 in 10 unemployed persons
have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more," the BLS said.