U.S. adds 160,000 jobs as brisk hiring slows

After months of gravity-defying gains, the U.S. jobs machine cooled slightly in April, as employers took their cue from other signs that economic growth was slowing by easing up on new hiring.

The 160,000 increase in payrolls in April reported by the Labor Department on Friday comes after the best two-year stretch for the job market since the tech-fueled boom of the late 1990s.

The unemployment rate stayed at 5 percent.

The consistent strength in hiring contrasts with other economic signals that have been decidedly mixed recently. Late last month, for example, the government reported that the economy barely expanded in the first quarter.

But most experts say the steady gains in the labor market in recent months are a sign that the economy should continue to expand at a decent, if hardly spectacular, pace for the rest of 2016.

A hopeful sign of the economy's trajectory in Friday's report was the 0.3 percentage point rise in average hourly earnings.

Until a nascent pickup recently, wages had been a sore point throughout the nearly seven-year recovery, barely rising despite the big drop in the unemployment rate.

The change in earnings in April suggests that the upward tick in wages wasn't a fluke. Wall Street had been expecting a 0.3 percentage point gain, which would translate to a 2.4 percent increase over the last year.

In an interview before the release of the data Friday, Diane Swonk, an independent economist, said there were indications that wages were shoring up, even if the month-to-month pattern had been uneven.

With dozens of states and cities having either already

implemented or considering future increases in the minimum wage, she explained, salaries at the low end of the job market are finally inching up.

"We've hit a tipping point," Swonk said. "It's showing up in low-wage jobs, for waiters and waitresses, in retail and in leisure and hospitality." States including California, Colorado, Michigan and Massachusetts increased their minimum wages at the start of 2016, while Maryland and Washington, D.C., are set to enact raises on July 1.

Whether a result of legally mandated increases at the bottom or because of raises doled out by employers eager to retain more skilled workers in a healthier economy, better-paying and more plentiful jobs also seem to be luring workers back into the job market.

"The good news is that we are re-engaging people who've been on the sidelines," Swonk said. "The question is how far we can go."

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 11:58 PM with the headline "U.S. adds 160,000 jobs as brisk hiring slows ."