June’s BLS report is another sob story of lost U.S. jobs and negative revisions
In an effort not to delay the inevitable, I’ll break the bad news to you first: the U.S lost 62,000 positions in June. To make matters worse, it looks as though the employment numbers (or rather, losses) from every month since the start of 2008 have been revised downward to reflect larger losses. Admittedly not great news for the U.S., but not that surprising either. The country has consistently posted negative payroll numbers in recent months, and the BLS seems to love revising every number it releases, even if some changes are more slight than others.
I realize that introducing bad news first implies that there is some sort of good news to report. What can I say, I felt like misleading all of you this afternoon. The employment situation data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday morning held few positive details. The health care sector did manage to generate jobs in June — 15,000 of them — but even that was a drop from the 30,000 positions that the industry’s been gaining on average each month since the middle of last year. Food services and drinking places (+16,000) and the government (+29,000) also added a respectable number of jobs, but clearly not enough to pull the country out of the red this past month.
The U.S. unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.5 percent. The number of newly unemployed persons (those jobless for fewer than five weeks) jumped upward in May by 760,000 and then decreased by more than 530,000 in June. Consequently, the number of persons in the country unemployed between five and 14 weeks rose by 530,000.
The most notable losses last month came in the construction (-43,000), manufacturing (-33,000), and professional and business services (-51,000) sectors. I mentioned in my overview of May’s report that the nation’s overall job losses in 2008 had surpassed 320,000. With the revisions made to prior months’ numbers and the new cuts that came in June, the U.S. has now dropped 438,000 positions since the start of the year.
But the average hourly rate for U.S. workers did increase by six cents to reach $18.01 in June, and I always like to think that the next BLS report (and another chance for an actual gain in jobs) is only four weeks away. So until then…let’s all hope for a miracle together.