July 01, 2015
The Labor Department reported that the economy added 223,000 jobs in June. While this was in line with most economists’ predictions, there were downward revisions of 60,000 to the data for the prior two months. This brings the average over the last three months to 221,000. The job growth was almost entirely in the service sector as the 4,000 job growth in manufacturing was offset by a loss of 3,000 jobs in mining, while construction employment was flat. There was also no change in the average hourly wage in June.
The household survey also showed a mixed picture. The unemployment rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 5.3 percent, the lowest rate for the recovery. However this was entirely due to people dropping out of the labor force as the employment-to-population ratio slipped back by 0.1 percentage points to 59.3 percent. This is also consistent with a sharp drop in the number of long-term unemployed, with many of these workers likely dropping out of the labor market.
One clear positive is that the number of people voluntarily working part-time rose sharply even as the number of people involuntarily working part-time fell. The number of people voluntarily working part-time is now more than 1.5 million above its level of two years ago, or 8.1 percent. This is undoubtedly due in large part to the ACA which freed workers from the need to get insurance through their employer.
