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The employment numbers for June are out, and the results, in the aggregate, are encouraging: After steadily declining through the year, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is a flat 10 percent. That’s down from 12 percent in January, which was up from 10.9 percent last July.
The interesting thing about this number is where the job growth and shrinkage shows up. The biggest category, Professional and Business services (bar 1), saw a significant bump of 3.3 percent over the last year, to 154,700. Leisure and hospitality (bar 3) also went up 0.7 percent, to 59,400; and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (bar 8) jumped 2.6 percent to 27,500. The losses came in the Construction and Information sectors (bars 7 and 6).
Though I don’t have exact numbers for the federal workforce, the Department of Employment Services release notes that the biggest source of growth has been jobs with the federal government, while the biggest drop has been Educational and Health Services, down 2.2 percent (to 98,900) from a year ago.
After cross-checking with median wage tables broken down by profession, that seems like a mix of relatively high and low-income professions. So we can’t necessarily make blanket statements like “high-income jobs are coming in, while low-income jobs are disappearing.” But it does look like social services have taken a hit relative to business-side employment.