The U.S. gained 431,000 jobs in May, according to this morning’s release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That sounds great—until you take into account that 411,000 of those positions were for temporary Census workers. The private sector added only 41,000 jobs, which is a drop in the bucket.
The employment rate edged down to 9.7%, but we’ve still got some 15 million people out of work. And we’re still facing a horrible long-term unemployment problem. In May, 6.8 million people without jobs—or 46% of all those unemployed—had been jobless for 27 weeks or more. (Sara Murray at the WSJ had a great piece the other day about who, exactly, makes up the long-term unemployed.)
There was a glimmer of good news in the latest BLS report. The number of people working part-time even though they’d like to be working full-time declined by 343,000, to 8.8 million.
Still, overall we continue to have a big, sideways moving labor market on our hands.