With anxiety about the economy bubbling up on Wall Street and at campaign rallies around the country, the government reported Friday that employers added 242,000 workers in February, a hefty increase that highlighted the labor market's steady gains.
Four years ago, at this point in the last presidential election cycle, the jobless rate was 8.3 percent and the economic recovery was in a relatively early stage.
Despite the improved economic picture, there is still plenty of distress and anger, emotions that have helped spur the success of the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, and rallied many Democrats behind the underdog Bernie Sanders' attacks on inequality and Wall Street cronyism.
Robust demand for lower paid hospitality and service workers has been helping keep the total job growth count up despite losses in higher paid manufacturing, transportation, warehousing and energy, industries that also tend to be dominated by blue-collar white men, who provide the core of support for Trump.
"Working people in states like Michigan and Ohio feel the lousy manufacturing job loss and growing trade deficit with China, even if Wall Street and D.C. do not," Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said in a statement.
