Over the last couple of months, the unemployment rate in the country has remained stable without much dilly-dallying. As per the monthly news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S Department of Labor, the national unemployment rate in July 2016 was 4.9%, the same as June.
During this month, the might of various industries added over 255,000 jobs to the U.S economy. The highest job creator was Professional & Business Services followed by Health Care. Mining continued to disappoint with some heavy job losses occurring in this sector. As our duty has been every month, let’s go ahead and explore this monthly news release and provide you the numbers across various categories.
Unemployment Rate Among Major Workers Groups
- Adult Men – 4.6%
- Adult Women – 4.3%
- Teenagers – 15.6%
Except Adult Men, the other two categories witnessed reduction in unemployment numbers. While Adult Women was down 0.1 percentage points, Teenagers recorded a drop of 0.4 percent from June 2016. This is welcome news for the stakeholders since the joblessness among Teenagers refused to drop over the last three months.
Unemployment Rate Among Ethnic Groups
- Blacks – 8.4%
- Asians – 3.8%
- Whites – 4.3%
- Hispanics – 5.4%
Nearly all ethnic groups except “Blacks” showed slight improvement from last month. Unemployment among Blacks continues to be a cause of worry for Labor authorities across various states in the country.
General Highlights
- Citizens falling under the category of unemployed less than 5 weeks saw a massive drop of 258,000.
- On the contrary, the number of long-term unemployed persons remained the same as last month. The number of people falling in this category was 2.0 million (jobless for 27 weeks or more).
- A little over 5.9 million people were categorized as part-time for economic reasons, nearly the same as June.
- During the starting month of the second half of the calendar year, 2.0 million people came under the category of marginally attached to the labor force, nearly the same as July 2015.
Employment Data in Various Industries (Top Highlights)
1) Professional & Business Services was the star of the month as it added 70,000 jobs, the highest from any sector in July. Over the last 12 months, this industry alone has added a whopping 550,000 jobs to the economy.
- Professional & Technical Services: +37,000 jobs
- Computer systems design & related services: +8,000 jobs
2) Health Care was the second highest job creator with 43,000 new employment opportunities added during this month.
- Ambulatory health care services: +19,000 jobs
- Hospitals: +17,000 jobs
3) Mining lost 6,000 jobs during the month. Since September 2014, this sector has been witnessing job loss, month on month.
Other Highlights
- The average workweek for all employees edged up by 0.1 hour to clock 34.5 hours in this month.
- The manufacturing workweek remained stable at 40.7 hours and the average overtime was 3.3 hours during this month.
- The average hourly earnings for all employees was $25.69, up by 8 cents from June.
- The average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees in the private sector was $21.59, up by 7 cents.
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