This is one of three parts of Friday's report analysis. Part One is the real unemployment rate. It's always that case that there's a lot more to a monthly employment picture than the jobs added or lost and base reported unemployment rate. There were all kinds of goodies to unpack from Friday's report.
Some key point from the July reports start with the headline unemployment rate of 3.9%, that's down from 4% last month and from 4.3% year over year. There were also 157,000 jobs added in July. Massive upward revisions totaling a positive 59,000 jobs rolled in from prior months for an all-in number of 216,000 jobs being added and once again uniting the government averages with the ADP Report averages. Lastly, 2.4 million new jobs added year over year and averaging over 200k new jobs per month for a full year.
The top industries for hiring ranked as follow. At number one, professional and business services with +51,000. Coming in at number two, manufacturing with +37,000 and closing the top three Healthcare with +34,000.
Now the real unemployment rate once underemployed and long-term unemployed people are accounted for. The actual was 7.5% down from 8.5% year over year.
Other key takeaways. When the long-term unemployed and marginally employed are factored in, the real unemployment is still nearly double the base reported rate. The forgotten folks include 1.4 million are long-term unemployed, 4.6 million are underemployed and 1.5 million are marginally attached to the workforce. 100,000 net improvement during the month. Lastly, the labor participation rate remained at 62.9%.
Every layer of the onion that’s peeled back, the better this report looked. It was an outstanding month for jobs and that wasn’t the only good news. We’re now essentially at the lowest real unemployment rate we've had since we started tracking the folks who aren’t counted in the government’s regular unemployment rate.
In part two we'll look at the demographics of the unemployed.
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