True, the unemployment rate ticked up a hair in March, to 5 percent, but (a) for good reasons: because more people entered the labor force looking for work, and (b) that’s still a low jobless rate, half of what it was at the worst of the recession back in 2009.

But just how tight is this job market? Are we at full employment? Does that mean workers finally are getting the bargaining power they need to push for higher pay?

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The answers: pretty tight, no, and not yet. But we’re getting there.

First, while we should definitely applaud the gains in the job market — and, in doing so, reject fact-free claims from certain campaigns about how Obamacare, or China, or immigrants or [group you hate here] are ruining everything! — there are three weak spots of note.

One, there’s the effect of the strong dollar on jobs in manufacturing. Factory employment fell 29,000 jobs last month and 18,000 in February. The figure below compares overall payrolls without factory jobs to the latter, showing the sharp divergence over the past year. What happened, and why should jobs in this sector be on such a different trajectory than most other sectors (extraction industries have also been whacked by the sharp decline in price of oil)?

The answer is that the value of the dollar relative to the currencies of our trading partners is up significantly, by about 15 percent over the past two years against a broad basket of the currencies of those with whom we trade. When that happens, our exports become more expensive in foreign markets and their exports to us get cheaper. This, in turn, exacerbates our trade deficit and hurts export-oriented sectors such as manufacturing.

Next, the unemployment rate may be nice and low but the underemployment rate is still too high. That rate includes the 6 million people who want full-time jobs but can only find part-time ones. I’ve estimated that at full employment, the underemployment rate should be 8.5 percent. But as the figure below reveals, while this more inclusive measure of slack has been falling pretty steadily — there are over 500,000 fewer involuntary part-timers now than a year ago — it’s still uncomfortably close to 10 percent.

Third, the labor force participation rate — LFPR — appears to be ticking up a bit, suggesting that job gains are pulling more formerly sidelined workers into the labor force. As the next figure shows, this important metric is up about half a percentage point, to 63 percent, since its trough around the end of last year.

But it’s still too low. In fact, we wouldn’t expect the full gap you see in this picture to go away. The LFPR reflects demographic change: More retirees will lower it in a way that says more about aging boomers (like me!) than the strength of labor demand. But some of the loss in the LFPR could and should still be recouped, perhaps as much as another percentage point, which in today’s labor market equal about 1.6 million people.

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So there you have three ways in which there’s still some slack in the job market. The strong dollar is holding down manufacturing employment, the underemployment rate is still almost 1.5 percentage points too high, and the LFPR still has room to grow.

As far as the last two go, the trend is our friend. They’re moving in the right direction. The dollar, on the other hand, may well continue to strengthen, as we’re doing better than many other countries, pulling in lots of investment flows that boost our currency.

Based on my argument that tight job markets deliver much-needed bargaining power to wage earners, a useful litmus test for labor-market tautness is wage trends. The final figure shows year-over-year nominal wage growth along with a slow moving trend to pull out the signal from the noise.

In fact, there’s been a slight acceleration, but you’ve got to squint to see it. That suggests we’re getting to the holy land of full employment, but we’re not there yet.