Labor
July Jobs Report: Hiring Numbers Beat Expectations, Unemployment Rate Remains Unchanged
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The U.S. economy remained resilient in the month of July, with employers adding an additional 255,000 jobs to the workforce, beating expectations that new hiring would top out at 180,000.
The Labor Department released its monthly jobs report Friday morning, and the new numbers indicate that U.S. employers remained unfazed by Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. While the numbers reflect the confidence of investors and employers, American jobs growth is still behind last year’s rate. So far this year, America has added about 1.3 million jobs, when it had gained about 1.6 million jobs by this point last year.
The economy has experienced an abysmal 1 percent annualized growth rate in the first half of the year, and experts are predicting that the annualized growth rate may rise up to 3.7 percent over the course of the next few months.
The report shows that average hourly pay is up 2.6 percent to $25.69 from where it was a year ago, which matches the fastest growth rate since the recession. The number of long-term unemployed persons remain unchanged from the previous month at 2 million, a number which makes up about 26.6 percent of the total unemployed. The labor force participation rate also changed little in July, holding steady at 62.8 percent.
The report showed that while government employment increased significantly, adding 38,000 new jobs, employment in construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade, and information showed little or no change over the month. Specifically, the mining industry lost another 6,000 jobs in July, which makes for a total of 220,000 jobs lost in the coal industry since peak employment figures in September 2014.
The new numbers may provide positive talking points for the Clinton campaign as she appeals to working class families across the rust-belt and the Midwest, but the slow rate of growth during the first half of 2016 has been a talking point for Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a top advisor to Trump calling the 1 percent annualized growth rate, “catastrophic.”
Chairman Kevin Brady of the House Ways and Means Committee released a statement that blasts the president for weak economic growth, and said that, “After another quarter of weak economic growth, today’s positive jobs report doesn’t mask the fact that, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year, hard-working Americans have been waiting for the economy to improve under the Obama Administration.”
Even with the new numbers, public perception of how the economy is doing has been poor and Clinton is walking a tight rope by crediting President Obama with rescuing the economy from a recession, while also refusing to accept the “status quo.”
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