Simply put, no. In these monthly data, one anomalous month does not a new trend make, for various reasons:

—Weather effects were probably in play in recent months, as an unseasonably warm February raised that month’s job gains above trend, while, conversely, a winter storm in March that blanketed parts of the Northeast and Midwest had the opposite effect in March.

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— The excellent Bureau of Labor Statistics gives us two set of entrails surveys to scrutinize each month: the survey of workplaces and that of households. (Why two? For one reason, because you can’t derive unemployment — people looking for jobs — by talking to workplaces.) In March, the household survey was strong, showing unemployment falling to 4.5 percent, its lowest rate of this expansion, now in its eighth year.

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— I know many suppress the memory of that statistics class you had to suffer through, but it’s my job to remind you that the monthly confidence interval around these monthly payroll numbers is 120,000 jobs, meaning that there is a 90 percent chance that the true change in payroll employment for the month of March lies between about -20,000 and 220,000.

So, don’t worry yet about the low job-gain number for March. There’s no hiring slump out there. But neither is everything rosy, and there’s a tentative sign of increasing wage inequality.

The figure below shows that while unemployment may be back to pre-recession lows, the share of involuntary part-timers is not. Though the trend is our friend here, too many people who’d rather be full-timers are stuck in part-time jobs.

Then there’s the all-important question of paychecks, and here I’ll show you a finding you won’t find in the report because it ain’t in there: While the tight labor market is driving up wage growth on average, there’s a sign that higher-wage workers are claiming most of the gains, i.e., rising wage inequality remains upon the land.

First, if you look at average wages of all private-sector workers, as in the figure below, you find that they’ve nicely accelerated from 2 percent to around 2.5 percent (March hit 2.7 percent). Now, as energy prices have picked up in recent months, that’s also about the rate of inflation, suggesting not much by way of real wage gains, even at the average. So, we’ll want to keep an eye on these nominal wage trends to make sure they continue to accelerate.

But the BLS also provides us with the pay of less-well-paid workers: blue-collar workers in manufacturing and non-managers in services. Their hourly pay, as I’ll show in a moment, hasn’t climbed as much as the average.

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Well, now that we’ve done some statistics, let’s do some math. If the average wage is accelerating while the wage of a subgroup is not, that implies that the wage of another subgroup must be growing faster than average.

That would be white-collar workers, and that’s what the figure below shows. Their pay was last seen rising at 3.5 percent, year-over-year, about a percentage point faster than lower paid workers (data note: the BLS does not compute the white collar wage, so I backed it out using employment shares, the average wage, and the blue-collar wage).

Again, the data are noisy, the relative trends flip about, so we must use caution in our assessment, but what you see here is consistent with both Elise Gould’s recent authoritative work on rising wage inequality and what we know of longer-term trends in the wage data.

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In fact, anyone who’s paying attention knows that economic inequality is deeply embedded in the U.S. economy. I’ve long argued, including in testimony delivered in Congress earlier this week, that policymakers must take steps to restrain the forces of inequality and provide workers and their families with more bargaining power and thus more opportunity. But too much of what I’m seeing — tax cuts favoring the wealthy partially paid for by spending cuts for opportunity-enhancing programs to help the poor — pushes the other way.