Minnesota employers added 2,800 jobs during March as the state’s unemployment rate dropped to a seasonally adjusted 6.6 percent.

That’s down 0.1 of a percentage point from February, according to figures released today by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED).

"The March figures reflect a continuing pattern of slow but steady progress in the Minnesota labor market," said DEED Commissioner Mark Phillips, in a release. "Through the first three months of the year, we've gained 7,300 jobs."

February's job gains were revised upward by 300 to 1,600 new jobs. The number of jobs in the state has grown by 0.8 percent over the past year, compared with a U.S. growth rate of 1 percent during that period.

The U.S. unemployment rate in March dipped to 8.8 percent, continuing its slow decline to the lowest level in nearly two years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With 216,000 jobs added nationwide, total payroll employment has grown by 1.5 million jobs across the nation since a recent low in February 2010, the BLS reported.

In separate job-related news, global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas declared today that the “so-called jobless recovery may have finally evolved into a job- growth recovery.”

Pointing to the recent surge in large-scale hiring announcements  and a 16-year low in layoff announcements for the first quarter, the Chicago-based firm said that “the job market is stronger than most Americans realize and improved faster than one might reasonably expect, considering the severity of the recession.”

Meanwhile, describing Minnesota’s rate of job gains as “slow but steady,” Steve Hine, DEED Labor Market Information Office research director, said in a conference call with reporters: “We’re the tortoise in the recovery right now. We’re lagging the nation [but] I don’t think this will persist much longer.”

After the peak employment time of February 2008, Minnesota employers shed 158,000 jobs through September 2009. Hine said 26,600 jobs have been added back.

He noted the three consecutive months of job gains as “a promising sign” but acknowledged that “this rate of job growth is inadequate to get us back to full employment in a reasonable time.”

With continued gross domestic product growth and modest productivity gains, Hine predicted that employers will “have to start hiring.” He foresees monthly job growth nationally in the range of 250,000 and “4,500 or so” for Minnesota.

Nevertheless, Hine describes the recovery as “fragile” and said a rebound in consumer confidence will be key to sustaining the momentum: “More spending leads to more hiring. More hiring leads to more spending.”

Rising gas prices or “counterproductive policy actions” could derail the recovery,” he said. “A retraction in government spending would be moving in the wrong direction in the short term in getting the economy moving in the right direction.”

The Challenger analysis of BLS data  found that, much like the previous two recessions, private-sector payrolls continued to contract following the declared end of the recession.

From July 2009 through February 2010, private payrolls experienced a net decline of nearly 1.2 million jobs nationally. Since then, however, private-sector employment has seen net job gains for 13 consecutive months, adding a total of 1.8 million jobs. As of March, there were about 108.6 million Americans on private-sector payrolls, about 93 percent of the pre-recession high of 115.6 million, the Challenger report said.

Challenger, which also tracks announced layoffs by employers, reported that through the first quarter, employers have announced 130,749 job cuts, 28 percent fewer than the 181,183 planned layoffs for the same period of 2010, and the lowest first quarter total since 1995. Nearly half of the announced job cuts in the first quarter were in the government sector.

In other economic news this week, Minneapolis-based Ceridian released its monthly economic indicator based on truck-fleet diesel fuel purchases. The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index (PCI), a real-time measure of the flow of goods to U.S. factories, retailers and consumers, rose 2.7 percent on a seasonally and workday adjusted basis in March, more than offsetting declines in the first two months.

On a quarter-over-quarter basis, the PCI is up 3.9 percent as an annual rate, “a welcome acceleration from the relatively weak growth of the PCI experienced in the second half of 2010,” Ceridian said.

Minnesota employment report detail
Leisure and hospitality led all sectors for Minnesota’s job growth during March, adding 1,900 jobs. Other job gains occurred in education and health services (up 1,500), construction (up 1,200), manufacturing (up 300), trade, transportation and utilities (up 300), and other services (up 100).

Job losses occurred in professional and business services (down 1,200), financial activities (down 800), government (down 300), information (down 100), and logging and mining (down 100).

Sectors adding jobs over the past year are: manufacturing (up 7,800), professional and business services (up 7,800), education and health services (up 5,500), trade, transportation and utilities (up 2,700), other services (up 2,100), and logging and mining (up 800).

Over-the-year job losses have occurred in construction (down 2,200), government (down 1,900), leisure and hospitality (down 1,600), financial activities (down 1,100) and information (down 300).

In the state Metropolitan Statistical Areas, job gains occurred in the past 12 months in the St. Cloud MSA (up 2 percent), Mankato MSA (up 1.1 percent), Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA (up 0.8 percent), Rochester MSA (up 0.5 percent) and Duluth-Superior MSA (up 0.1 percent).