July Jobs Report Is Like Watching Paint Dry

This morning’s jobs report showed continued steady progress toward full employment in July. Employers added 215,000 to their payrolls in the month, and upward revisions in BLS employment numbers for May and June increased job gains in those two months by 14,000. As usual, virtually all the increase in payrolls occurred in the private sector. Government employment inched up just 5,000 in July, about the same rate of gain as in the previous 11 months. Since the beginning of the Great Recession public payrolls have shrunk more than 450,000, or 2%. Over the same period private employers added almost 4.2 million jobs. In the past 12 months, private employers accounted for 98% of all gains in payroll employment. So far the employment recovery has been overwhelmingly concentrated in the private sector.