June jobs report exceeds expectations

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The slow but steady progress in creating jobs — things would be going better but for GOP austerity measures — continued in June with a jobs report that exceeded most economists expectations, and previous months were revised upwards. Steve Benen reports, U.S. job growth improves, exceeds expectations:

Going into this morning, most economists projected job growth from June to be about 155,000 new jobs. With this in mind, the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows not only good news, but unexpectedly good news.

The U.S. economy added a better-than-expected 195,000 jobs in June
and employment gains for May and April were revised sharply higher
, the
U.S. government said Friday. The unemployment rate was unchanged at
7.6%, but the size of the labor force increased by 177,000, according to
the Labor Department said.

As is usually the case, there was a gap between the two
major sectors — America's private sector added 202,000 jobs last month,
while spending cuts caused the public sector shed 7,000 jobs.

JuneJobs

Perhaps
the most important — and most heartening — detail in this new report
is the upward revisions for the previous two months. In April, the
economy added 199,000 jobs (up from a previous estimate of 149,000),
while May revisions point to 195,000 jobs (up from 175,000). Taken
together, that's 70,000 previously unreported jobs, on top of the new
totals from June
.

Given these figures, the three-month stretch —
April through June — is the best we've seen since early 2012. To be
sure, if the economic recovery were more robust, we'd see even stronger
numbers, but given where we've been, and the steps taken to undermine
growth (sequestration cuts), this is an awfully encouraging jobs report.

All
told, for the first half of calendar year 2013, the economy has added
1.21 jobs overall
, and 1.23 million in the private sector. Not too
shabby.

Here's another chart, this one showing monthly job losses/gains in just the private sector since the start of the Great Recession. (40 consecutive months of private sector job growth).

JunePrivate

3 thoughts on “June jobs report exceeds expectations”

  1. Its not that the are cooked, its that they don’t show a crucial number : hours of work. Over the last five years, this economy has failed to deliver for the working man – hours of work are lower than they were five years ago. We are nine million jobs short of performing as well as we did in 2006. To cover this up, we have stuffed an added 3 million people on permanent disability.

  2. A lot of supposition without any facts. You do know the details of the jobs reports are available online, right? And you do know these are estimates, not raw numbers, that get adjusted with additional data over time, right? If this is another lame attempt to suggest the numbers are “cooked,” you are wrong.

  3. This report is puzzling. Big increase in underemployed – leaped a whloe half prrcent. Huge inrease in part-time employment. 322,000 yet avrrage hours did not go down – stayed flat.

    That is some strange math. Evrrone of these jobs had to be between 35 and 39 hours per week. Or, if you kept your full time job, your hours had to go up. While they took a lot of people down.

    Strange things happening in jobs.

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