“If wages aren’t growing and we can’t get people back into the labor force, it won’t be possible to keep adding 200,000 jobs each month”.
Advertisement
[Related: Despite Baltimore unrest, Maryland has been adding hospitality jobs.].
Obama’s proposal to deal with stagnating wages, unveiled earlier this week and reiterated in his report, is a scheme to make an additional 3 percent of United States workers eligible for overtime.
The latest BLS report on the nation’s employment picture, released on July 2, showed that construction’s June jobless rate edged down to 6.3% from the previous month’s 6.7%.
The 157,037,000 people counted as participants in the labor force consist of 148,739,000 who actually hold jobs, along with another 8,299,000 who don’t have jobs but are actively looking. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 2%. The housing market will benefit from strengthening labor market conditions for the average American, but continued good news like this will increase the likelihood of rate increase by the Fed in the fall. The BLS unemployment rates are not adjusted for seasonal variations. The labor force is defined as those over the age of 16 who are working or seeking work that aren’t in the military or institutionalized.
“For eating and drinking places, the 3.7 percent year-to-date growth puts the restaurant industry on track to register its fourth consecutive year with job growth of at least 3.5 percent”. At this time of year, a large number of people move into and out of employment and unemployment. Employment growth was widespread within the industry in June, with gains in ambulatory health care services (+23,000), hospitals (+11,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+7,000). These individuals made up 25.8 percent of the unemployed in June.
The BLS revised the Current Population Survey, which gathers the data needed to determine these rates, in 1994.
The revisions, however, were less encouraging. This isn’t about discouraged workers.
A person who simply expresses interest in having a job is classified as unemployed.
Indiana County tied with Schuylkill County for the 49th lowest unemployment rate among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties in May. The U-3 rate can also dip temporarily when such people find temporary jobs and then lose them a month or two later. The sector added an average of just 6,167 workers per month in the first half of this year, a much slower rate of hiring than observed in the second half of 2014, which averaged 20,667 per month.
The civilian labor force declined by 432,000 in June, which calculated to a drop of 0.3 percentage points down to 62.6 percent.
Advertisement
The day before the BLS issued its employment report, payroll services firm ADP Inc. issued its monthly National Employment Report, based on its own payroll records.
