THE ECONOMY: Unemployment Down

JOBS UP, frontpaged the Cleveland Press. IDLE DOWN, headlined the Washington Daily News. What they had to report was not so much a rise and a fall as a direction: for the first time since the economy’s sag set in nearly a year ago, the U.S. Government was able to report last week that unemployment had dropped at more than the usual seasonal rate. In a joint release, the Commerce and Labor Departments announced a May unemployment total of 4,904,000, down 216.-000 from April. The unemployment percentage shrank from 7.5% of the labor force to 7.2%, and total employment rose to 64,061,000, showing a better-than-seasonal jump of 1,154,000.

To avoid spreading excessive cheer, Commerce-Labor pointed out that the silver cloud had a grey lining. Much of the May job increase resulted from a surge of hirings for construction projects that had been delayed by early spring’s foul weather; employment in manufacturing, the economy’s soft spot, actually declined again in May. And Capitol Hill’s bearish Joint Economic Committee predicted last week that the economy will not get back its full pre-recession robustness until mid-1959 at the earliest, and possibly not until late 1960.