Manufacturers, services employers add tens of thousands of jobs
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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.
