Sluggish Small-Business Hiring May Portend U.S. Job Weakness

(Bloomberg) -- Hiring at the smallest U.S. businesses is moderating, a sign of sluggishness in the economy.

Growth has slowed in some indexes measuring employment at companies with fewer than 20 workers. This deceleration indicates a disconnect in the labor market; payrolls for all nonfarm employers rose at the fastest pace since 2001 in the 12 months through February, based on Labor Department data.

Monitoring the smallest companies is important because they accounted for about 23 percent of all nonfarm private jobs created last year, said Ahu Yildirmaz, head of the ADP Research Institute in Roseland, New Jersey.

Their payroll growth accelerated to almost 57,000 in March, bringing the first-quarter average to about 48,900, according to seasonally adjusted ADP data released today. That compares with about 54,700 in all of 2014.

The March figures for employers with less than 19 workers showed a “solid increase” that’s “back in line with the growth we saw last year,” Yildirmaz said. “There’s nothing happening fundamentally in the economy which would cause the slowdown we saw in the first two months of the year, so hopefully this trend will continue.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/sluggish-small-business-hiring-may-portend-labor-market-weakness