Is this a hiccup, or a turn back to the job-market lethargy of 2025? One thing is certain – the timing could not be worse for the White House and Republicans facing a tough midterm election cycle.
The news from the BLS jobs report for June isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not good either. The economy added only 57,000 jobs last month, although the unemployment rate declined slightly to 4.2%. The good news from previous months got tempered a bit as well in the revisions:
Both total nonfarm payroll employment (+57,000) and the unemployment rate (4.2 percent) changed little in June, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in professional and business services, social assistance, and health care. Leisure and hospitality lost jobs. …
The labor force participation rate decreased by 0.3 percentage point to 61.5 percent in June, and the employment-population ratio edged down by 0.2 percentage point to 59.0 percent. Both measures changed little over the year after accounting for annual population control adjustments. (See table A-1.)
The number of people employed part time for economic reasons changed little at 4.7 million in June. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)
In June, the number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job changed little at 6.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job. (See table A-1.)
The decline in workforce participation will likely concern analysts. The drop of 720K in the workforce should have pushed those numbers up rather than down, since the workforce number is the denominator in that formula. However, the sudden outflow of 720K from the workforce in a single month looks suspicious. The Household Data survey has been notoriously inconsistent for years, and this big swing between two successive phone polls should raise questions about methodology … again.
The jobs numbers come from the Establishment Survey, which polls employers rather than households and generally displays more data stability over the BLS jobs reports. That’s where the topline number of 57,000 added jobs originates, and it’s also the source of BLS revisions in later reports. That definitely produced some bad news about two relatively robust previous reports:
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for April was revised down by 31,000, from +179,000 to +148,000, and the change for May was revised down by 43,000, from +172,000 to +129,000. With these revisions, employment in April and May combined is 74,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
[more to come]
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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