Economist June job gains put U.S. on track with January 2000 employment

Weekly and monthly updates on employment during the recovery have their place, but when reading the studies for business planning purposes, Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at Roseland-based J.H. Cohn, said historical perspective offers the most useful look at new numbers.

Weekly and monthly updates on employment during the recovery have their place, but when reading the studies for business planning purposes, Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at Roseland-based J.H. Cohn, said historical perspective offers the most useful look at new numbers.

Automated Data Processing, also in Roseland, issued its monthly employment numbers Thursday, reporting 157,000 private-sector jobs were created nationally in June, up from 36,000 in May.

“If we step back, in the United States today, there are slightly more private-sector jobs than was the case in January of 2000,” O’Keefe said. “A gain even of 157,000 jobs in the broader scheme of things is positive, but only marginally positive. We still have enormous unused human resources, and there’s no immediate, no near-term indication that situation is going to be resolved.”

O’Keefe said the results from the ADP report, in addition to a report of reduced layoffs by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. that came out Wednesday, confirms the ongoing trend that since the job market recovery began in March 2010, there has been a continued slow growth.

When May employment numbers were released, a decrease in manufacturing jobs created even more pessimism about the recovery. Manufacturing, for the first time in the post-World War II era, had become an important component of the recovery, and had been steadily increasing for seven straight months.

According to O’Keefe, the pullback in manufacturing jobs was “disproportional” due to large disruptions in automakers’ supply chains.

“Given that households constitute 70 percent of gross domestic product, when employment and labor markets remain as lethargic as they have been through this recovery, we can’t look to the household sector to expand spending,” O’Keefe said. “Therefore, we can’t expect the rate of GDP growth is going to move dramatically higher any time soon. From a business perspective, we want to plan for improvement, but not get ahead of the parade.”