1.9 jobs available for every unemployed person—close to the record high

Everyone is talking about a recession but the labor market remains blazing hot.

The U.S. economy added 372,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6 percent, the Department of Labor said Friday.

Economists had expected the economy to add 250,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 3.6 percent. The range of forecasts by economists surveyed by Econoday was between a gain of 190,000 to 350,000.

The private sector added 381,000 jobs in June, also more than expected. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for April was revised down by 68,000, from 436,000 to 368,000, and the change for May was revised down by 6,000, from 390,000 to 384,000.

On average, the economy has added 456,000 jobs per month in 2022, an extremely high rate of payroll building.

The labor force participation rate ticked down a tenth of a point to 62.2 percent.

The manufacturing sector saw a big jump in jobs, with payrolls rising by 29,000. The May figure was revised up to 23,000 from the earlier estimate of 18,000.

The economy rebounded from the pandemic much faster than expected. The labor market, in particular, quickly recovered much of the damage done by 2020’s lockdowns and social distancing, with the unemployment rate dropping much faster than expected. Demand for goods soared as American incomes were pumped up with stimulus money from various government programs and social distancing rules left people bereft of many of the leisure services activities–sports, concerts, travel, movies–that typically would have drained bank accounts.

The supply side of the economy could not keep up with the shift into spending on goods, especially with many exporting countries also struggling with the pandemic. China’s ports have suffered a series of closures under the country’s zero-tolerance policy for Covid. Various stages of the global supply chain to build semiconductors have also broken down, creating shortages that forced makers of everything from cars, to appliances, to phones to slow production.

At the end of May, there were 11.3 million job vacancies, the government reported this week. Prior to the pandemic, the highest number of openings picked up by the government’s Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey was 7.4 million in 2019. The record high was from March of this year, at 11.9 million. With the May figure, there were around 1.9 jobs for every unemployed person—close to the record high.

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