Quick Facts:
- Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 372,000 in June.
- Unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.6 percent.
- Notable job gains occurred in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and health care.
- The number of unemployed remained essentially unchanged at 5.9 million.
- The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially unchanged at 1.3 million.
- The number of job leavers – that is, unemployed persons who quit or voluntarily left their previous job and began looking for new employment – increased by 68,000 to 832,000 in May.
Looking Forward:
- The unemployment rate in June remained at 3.6% for a fourth straight month, the Labor Department said Friday, matching a near 50-year low that was reached before the pandemic struck in 2020.
- Many employers are still struggling to fill jobs, especially in the economy’s service sector, with Americans now traveling, eating out and attending public events with much greater
- frequency. The Fed may see the June job gains as evidence that the rapid pace of hiring is feeding inflation as companies raise pay and then raise prices to cover higher labor costs.
- Fed Chair Jerome Powell has held out hope that the economy will continue to expand even as the central bank raises borrowing costs at its fastest pace since the late 1980s. But Powell has also acknowledged that overseas factors, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has elevated gas and food prices, will make it difficult to avoid a recession.
- Inflation hit a 40-year high of 8.6% in May amid lingering supply-chain troubles and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Sharply climbing prices are squeezing companies’ profit margins, leading many to scale back hiring plans, says economist Lydia Boussour of Oxford Economics. Consumers are also cutting back as costs swell. Manufacturing and service sector activity is expanding more slowly. And initial jobless claims, a gauge of layoffs, have trended higher in recent months, though they’re still historically low.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
