The June jobs report landed on July 2 and, on the surface, looked almost okay. The unemployment rate ticked down from 4.3% to 4.2%. Progress, right?
Not quite. That improvement came almost entirely because roughly 720,000 people stopped looking for work altogether. When you leave the workforce, you stop counting as unemployed. In English: the headline number got better because more people gave up, not because more people found jobs.
The numbers underneath the number
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported just 57,000 nonfarm payroll jobs added in June. Economists had expected somewhere between 110,000 and 115,000. That is not a small miss.
For context, May’s already-modest figure was revised down to 129,000, and prior months were collectively revised lower by another 74,000 jobs.
