From the Star Ledger:

Jobless rate holds steady as officials note bad trend

Employment in New Jersey was essentially unchanged in March — even though the nation as a whole lost 80,000 jobs last month, state officials reported yesterday.

New Jersey’s nearly 4 million work force gained 1,000 jobs in March, bringing to 9,700 the number of jobs lost in the first three months of the year — when the nation’s payrolls fell by 232,000.
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Economist Joseph Seneca of the Bloustein School at Rutgers said, “The state is fully participating in the weak labor market caused by the national recession, and going forward we remain exposed in finance, and in business and professional services connected to the financial sector.”

New Jersey gained 1,000 jobs in March, 700 in government and 300 in the private sector. Seneca focuses on private sector employment, which he said declined by 10,500 jobs in the first quarter in New Jersey, while the nation lost 286,000 private sector jobs in the quarter.

Seneca said the rest of the year is likely to be weak. “When the finance sector was booming, it was very beneficial to the region, and now we are likely to experience the obverse of this.”
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Rae Rosen, senior economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said while New Jersey is tracking the nation, there are some regional differences. While business and professional services have weakened substantially in New York City, that sector is holding up better in New Jersey so far, Rosen said. The same goes for the education and health sectors, she said. “This is what we are seeing in the data, but we don’t know why.”