U.S. Employers Add Most Jobs In Four Months
Sunday, July 9th, 2017 -- 9:38 AM
U.S. employers added a robust 222,000 jobs in June, the most in four months, a reassuring sign that businesses may be confident enough to keep hiring despite a slow-growing economy.The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent in May, which was a 16-year low, the Labor Department said Friday. The jobless rate rose because more Americans began looking for work and not all of them found it. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth for April and May by a combined 47,000. In the first six months of this year, hiring has averaged nearly 180,000 jobs a month, only slightly below last year’s pace.
Yet even with the strong hiring, average hourly pay rose in June by just 2.5 percent from a year earlier. That’s below the 3.5 percent pace typical of a healthy economy. Friday’s figures suggest that after eight years of a grinding but resilient recovery, American businesses still have room to hire at a healthy pace. The rate of job growth has slowed since peaking in 2014 and 2015. But it is still strong enough to pull in workers who had previously stopped looking for work. The proportion of adults who have jobs ticked up to 60.1 percent, just below April’s figure, which was the highest since the recession ended in 2009.
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