Hiring in the United States is inching up — but not quickly enough to put much of a dent in the backlog of nearly 12 million unemployed workers left stranded by the recession and its aftermath.

American employers added 175,000 jobs in May, almost exactly the average monthly job growth over the last year, the Labor Department reported Friday, and wages remained basically flat. Economists were relieved that the numbers were not worse, given a string of other disappointing data in recent weeks, but noted that current job trends still left the economy far short of what it is capable of if Americans were more fully employed.

At the current pace of job and labor force growth, it would take nearly five years to get the economy back to the low unemployment rate it had when the recession officially began in December 2007.

“I feel hopeless, and that just makes it hard,” said Sherry Lockhart, 53, of Enumclaw, Wash., who was laid off by the state’s liquor control board a year ago, when voters privatized liquor sales. Now, her jobless benefits are about to be slashed as a result of federal spending cuts. “I just feel I’ve done my best over the years, and I feel like I haven’t failed the system. The system has failed me, and millions more.”