The following is a report from the Associated Press (AP).
The U.S. labor market delivered another upside surprise last month, churning out a surprisingly strong 147,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked down unexpectedly, too.
But the headline numbers masked some weaknesses as the U.S. economy contends with fallout from President Donald Trump’s economic policies, especially his sweeping import taxes and the erratic way he rolls them out.
Here are five key takeaways from the jobs report the Labor Department released on Thursday.
The headline jobs numbers looked good
June hiring was up modestly from May’s 144,000 increase in payrolls and beat the 118,000 jobs economists had forecast for last month. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.1% from 4.2% in May as the ranks of the unemployed fell by 222,000. Forecasters had expected the jobless rate to inch up to 4.3%.
Labor Department revisions added 16,000 jobs to April and May payrolls.
Average hourly wages came in cooler than forecasters expected, rising 0.2% from May and 3.7% from a year earlier. The year-over-year number is inching closer to the 3.5% considered consistent with the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target.
Healthcare jobs increased by 39,000. State governments added 47,000 workers and local governments 33,000.
“On net, it was a good report,’’ said Sarah House, senior economist with Wells Fargo, “But when you dig underneath the surface, it was another jobs report that didn’t look quite as good as first meets the eye.’’
Private companies, for instance, hired just 74,000 workers last month, about half the 137,000 they hired in May. And it was the fewest hires since last October, when there were significant labor disruptions from hurricanes.
State and local governments added nearly 64,000 education jobs last month – a total that may have been inflated by seasonal quirks around the end of the school year.
The U.S. labor force — the count of those working and looking for work — fell by 130,000 last month on top of a 625,000 drop in May.
Economists expect Trump’s immigration deportations — and the fear of them — to push foreign workers out of the labor force. A falling labor force can keep the unemployment rate lower than it would be otherwise. That is because jobseekers need time to find employment and can show up as unemployed in the interim.
A good job can be hard to find
With unemployment low, most Americans enjoy job security. But as hiring has cooled over the past couple of years it’s become harder for young people or those re-entering the workforce to find jobs, leading to longer job searches or longer spells of unemployment.
The Labor Department said the number of discouraged workers, who believe no jobs are available for them, rose by 256,000 last month to 637,000.
When he was laid off earlier this year from his job as a communications manager for a city government in the Seattle area, Derek Wing braced for the worst. “The word I would use is: ‘terrifying’’’ to describe the experience, he said. Lots of big local employers like Microsoft continue to cut jobs. And he’d heard horror stories of people applying for jobs and then – crickets. “I had a couple of experiences where I would apply for a job and just feel like it was going out into the ether and never hearing back,’’ he said.
But Wing’s fortunes turned quickly. He applied for an opening with Gesa Credit Union. Six weeks later – “superfast in this economy’’ — he had a job as a communications strategist for Gesa.
