NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Employment is the first big report of the month because it's the first one that covers the entire economy: all the sectors (industry, services, government), all the geographical regions, and all kinds of people, employed and unemployed.

The early read on the April employment report is not good:

• Unemployment rate up to 6.0 percent
• Non-farm payrolls down 48,000 in April though this was not as bad as the 58,000 loss expected
• However, March payrolls revised to show a loss of 124,000 instead of 108,000
• Average workweek shrank to an alltime low of 34.0 hours from 34.3 and this is considered a proxy for the overall growth of the economy (if companies are cutting back on hours it's another sign that they are seeing less demand); it's now running well below the first quarter average for hours worked.
• Number of discouraged workers (those who have dropped out of labor force because they can't find work) stands at 437,000 in April up from 320,000 a year ago.
• Manufacturing jobs plunged by 95,000 -- twice the recent average AND the diffusion index, which measures how many firms are hiring vs. how many firing at 33.8 -- well below 50, the dividing line between net expansion and net contraction.

BUT the markets were braced for a much weaker report. As a result, the Treasury bond market actually eased a bit in price.

Also, there was a loss of "only" 10,000 in retail jobs.

Recently by Kathleen Hays Waiting on Sir Alan Singing the paycheck blues It's the jobs, stupid

Another caveat: even though the war was ending in April the uncertainty it created had probably not dissipated by mid-April when the government did its survey. So economy bulls are likely to take the report with a grain of salt saying that we can't get a clean read on a possible post-war response until numbers on May are available.

As for the Federal Reserve, Chairman Alan Greenspan said this week he expects the economy to pick up in the second half of the year, and acknowledged that the high level of jobless claims currently suggests firms still see tepid demand and therefore are not hiring. So most economists do not expect this report, weak as it is, to trigger a rate cut at the Fed's meeting next week.

Kathleen Hays anchors The FlipSide, airing Monday to Friday on CNNfn. As part of CNN's Business News team, she is also a regular contributor to Lou Dobbs Moneyline.