Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in June (Sucks, Sucks, Sucks)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The American economy added 223,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 133,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the mediocre news it looks like. It was all bad news. Essentially the entire decrease in the unemployment rate was due to 432,000 people leaving the labor force, reversing an increase of 397,000 last month. Because of this, the labor force participation ratio declined by 0.3 percentage points to 62.6 percent, the lowest number in recent history.

Oh, and we had downward revisions of 60,000 jobs in April and May. And hourly wage growth of production and nonsupervisory workers was up by a measly 2 cents, a nominal increase of 0.1 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a decrease of about 0.3 percent.

I don’t know how to dress this up. The net number of new jobs was OK, if not spectacular, but the rest of the report is just dismal. The number of people actually employed dropped by 56,000, labor force participation has tanked, and real wage growth was negative. If anyone else can put lipstick on this pig, they’re welcome to try. It looks pretty gruesome to me. The only good news I can take out of it is that this is only a single month’s data, which jumps around quite a bit. Maybe next month will be better.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate