US unemployment falls as workers abandon jobs market Employers hired a modest 115,000 workers last month, the Labor Department said. But those new jobs were more than offset by a drop in the labour force of 342,000 as people abandoned their search for work. The participation rate - the percentage of the population currently in work - slipped from 63.8pc to 63.6pc last month, a 30-year low. The number of "discouraged workers" - those who are not actively looking for work because they believe there are no available jobs - reached 968,000. Still, the government revised upward its initial estimates for payroll growth in February and March by a combined 53,000. That left the six-month average of job growth at 197,000, nearly exactly where it would have been had April job growth come in at 170,000, as expected. Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics, said: "The very modest 115,000 increase in US non-farm payrolls in April will raise fears that the recovery is fading fast, just like it did at this time last year. The overall Employment Report wasn't quite as bad as the modest headline gain suggests, however. For a start, the gains in February and March were revised up by a combined 53,000. But the report, which regularly sets the tone for financial markets around the world, could still rattle nerves at the White House. Weak US growth and high unemployment create a formidable headwind for Obama, who entered office during the darkest days of the 2007 to 2009 recession. His Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, repeatedly has accused Obama of doing too little to foster job growth. The unemployment rate, which soared to as high as 10pc during Obama's first year in the office, held near 9pc for most of last year before falling sharply over the winter. Still, it remains about 2 percentage points higher than its average over the last 50 years, and the US Federal Reserve thinks it probably will not post a full recovery for at least another several years. The news helped to push the FTSE 100 down 1.39pc, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones was off by 0.74pc, the S&P 500 had dropped 0.91pc and the Nasdaq slipped 1.05pc.