The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that, seasonally adjusted, the private sector added 202,000 new jobs in June while government shed 7,000. The official unemployment rate remained steady at 7.6 percent. The private sector has now added more jobs than it has lost for 39 consecutive months.

The monthly tally makes no distinction between full-time and part-time jobs, nor does it consider how much those jobs pay or provide in non-wage benefits compared with the ones that have been lost. June is also tough for the BLS to measure accurately because of the large number of youth who enter the job market that month.

The 175,000 jobs gain the BLS reported for May was revised to 195,000. Gains in April were revised from 149,000 to 199,000.

In addition to the headline unemployment rate—known at the BLS as U3—another BLS metric known as U6 includes part-time workers who need full-time work but can't find it, and a portion of "discouraged workers." U6 for June was 14.3 percent, up sharply from 13.8 percent in May. That is the highest level since February.

The civilian labor force participation ratio rose to 63.5 percent, still its lowest level since 1979; the employment-population ratio rose to 58.7 percent. If the participation rate had remained at the pre-recession level, the unemployment rate would now be 9.6 percent. Some 36.7 percent of the 11.7 million people who are officially unemployed—4.3 million—have been out of a job for 27 weeks or more. Those long-term unemployed represent 2.8 percent of the labor force. Before this recession, the highest these numbers had ever reached in 65 years were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively. That occurred 30 years ago, in June 1983.

While overall job growth has remained in positive territory, a recovery that reduces unemployment and lures discouraged people back into the labor force still demands faster economic growth that we've been seeing. In an economy that had already recovered, the 195,000 gain in jobs reported for June would be ample. But it is well below the 250,000 to 300,000 added jobs needed each month for a vigorous recovery given how deep a plunge occurred.

Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute pointed out Wednesday:



[J]ob growth in the current recovery is slightly stronger than the job growth following the recession of 2001. However, it is slower than in the prior two recoveries and is in fact slower than in any other previous recovery dating back to World War II. Furthermore, jobs fell much further and faster during the Great Recession than in any other recession over that period, meaning that we are stuck in a much larger jobs-hole four years into recovery than in any previous business cycle. The fact that four years into the recovery we still have not yet come close to making up the jobs lost in the downturn, (much less the jobs needed to keep up with growth in the potential workforce over that time), is a grimmer situation than anything our labor market has seen in seven decades.