Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart by Amanda Cox. Horizontal axis shows months.
Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession.
Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized
with National Bureau of Economic Research’s official business cycle dates.
The economy lost 125,000 jobs in June, driven primarily by the elimination of 225,000 temporary Census positions. In just the private sector, payrolls increased by 83,000, a modest gain over employment in May.
The chart above shows job changes in this recession compared with recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. The line has ticked upward since last year, but still has a long way to go before the job market fully recovers to its pre-recession level. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5.4 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that doesn’t even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.
The unemployment rate (measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are looking for work) edged downward to 9.5 percent in June, from 9.7 percent in May.
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