The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday that job growth in the U.S. economy misses expectations and the headline unemployment rate inched up to 6.2 percent. Even though the jobs report marks the six straight month of job creation above 200,000, the number is a bit of a disappointment.
Reporting less-than-expected job creation in the second quarter is a trend that has been established over the past five years since the end of the Great Recession.
Employment in health care changed little over the month, because healthy job gains in ambulatory health care services (+21,000) were offset by losses in hospitals (-7,000) and nursing care facilities (-6,000), a long-time charged consequence of ObamaCare. A networks shrink, nurses in out-of-network hospitals and nursing care facilities will be laid off.
The unemployment rate for adult women increased to 5.7 percent and the rate for blacks further increased to 11.4 percent in July.
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — those working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs — was unchanged in July at 7.5 million. Meanwhile, the Employment Cost Index report released Thursday found that labor costs jumped 0.7 percent, up sharply from the 0.3 percent rate for the first quarter.
The civilian labor force participation rate was flat in June at 62.9 percent for the third month in a row and is hovering at its lowest level since the late 1970s. The employment-population ratio at 59% was little changed from the prior month. The number of long-term unemployed. or those jobless for 27 weeks or more, was unchanged at 3.2 million.
A whopping 2.2 million persons were still marginally attached to the labor force. These people wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the past 12 months, but were unable to find any. They were not counted in the unemployment rate because they quit on the American dream sometime in the past 4 weeks.
Among the marginally attached, there were 741,000 discouraged workers in July who are not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available.
“The economy still has a huge amount of headwind out there from the popping of the credit bubble,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist for MFR, in an interview before the labor market numbers were released. “We’re not through that by any means.”
