Manufacturers, services employers add tens of thousands of jobs

In industries like professional and business services, manufacturing and leisure and hospitality, it still looks like boom times if the job market is any indication.

Driving the news: The job market shrugged off talk of a recession in June, adding 372,000 jobs, about 100,000 more than economists had expected. The unemployment rate remained at 3.6% for the fourth straight month, near a 50-year low.

• Manufacturers are dealing with a shift from purchases of physical goods to services but nonetheless added 29,000 jobs for the month.
• The leisure and hospitality sector — the beneficiary of a travel boom after an especially fallow period — added 67,000 positions.
• Employers in the professional and business services sector added 74,000 jobs.

Be smart: Companies have been dealing with labor shortages since the early going of the pandemic — and that challenge hasn't suddenly gone away.

• "You can’t lay off what you were never able to hire," Lightcast senior economist Ron Hetrick said in a statement. "This may be an economic downturn in terms of GDP, but I don’t think you’re going to see the accompanying layoffs that go with it.”
• The strong job report "appears to make a mockery of claims the economy is heading into, let alone already in, a recession," Capital Economics reported Friday.

Yes, but: More jobs than expected may give the Fed more reason to proceed with aggressive rate hikes, which could then trigger a contraction.

• The tech sector, for example, has been signaling a tightening with layoffs and plans to cut hiring.