Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 7, 1994                   TAG: 9405090133
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

IN APRIL, 267,000 NEW JOBS

The unemployment rate was 6.4 percent, down from 6.5 percent in February and March, the Labor Department said. It was 6.7 percent in January.

The report said the nation's non-farm payrolls swelled by 267,000, considerably higher than the 170,000 or so new jobs many analysts were expecting.

"This is great news for main-street America," said Allen Sinai, chief economist for Lehman Brothers in New York. "The economy is cooking. There is lots of hiring; workers are working a lot of hours, earning more money than before. That is the fuel for sustained expansion."

Katharine G. Abraham, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said job growth would have been even stronger if not for the nationwide trucking strike by the Teamsters, which idled 70,000 drivers and dock workers most of the month.

The report "demonstrates fairly conclusively that labor markets are continuing to strengthen," said Norman Robertson, an adjunct business professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Investors, who worried that strong economic momentum would fuel inflation, reacted negatively to the news and sent stock and bond prices tumbling.

In advance of the report, analysts suggested that even an increase of 170,000 jobs would worry investors and influence the Federal Reserve to tighten credit later this month.

Investors fear that surges in the number of new jobs increase inflationary pressures, lowering the value of fixed-income investments. Higher interest rates tend to slow economic growth.

"This puts the heat on the Federal Reserve to move interest rates up," said Stephen S. Roach, senior economist with Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York.

The Labor Department said construction-related businesses hired an additional 67,000 workers, much higher than the 25,000 or so most economists were predicting.

A healthy 80,000 jobs were added in retail trade, the third consecutive monthly increase after a decline in January. The Labor Department said 54,000 of those jobs were in restaurants, which traditionally add workers in the spring.

The report said the average work week remained at the post-World War II record of 42.2 hours set in March, but average hourly earnings crept up 0.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted $11.06.