The unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, the same as a month earlier, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The number is in line with the average gain over the last few months, including 368,000 in April and 384,000 in May. Employers have continued to compete for workers in recent months, with initial unemployment claims rising only slightly from their low point in March.
The private sector has now regained its prepandemic number of jobs, while the public sector remains 664,000 jobs below February 2020. Other than the public sector, no industry lost jobs in June, on a seasonally adjusted basis.
“We’ve essentially ground our way back to where we were pre-Covid,” said Christian Lundblad, a professor of finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. “So this doesn’t necessarily look like a dire situation, despite the fact that we’re struggling with inflation and economic declines in some other dimensions.”
Business leaders report that, although domestic demand remains strong and some supply chain issues have eased, order backlogs are no longer growing as quickly and savings accounts are shrinking. Whenever possible, employers are automating tasks rather than bringing on new employees.
“Employers are getting less anxious to fill those job postings as they watch the economy slow,” said Bill Adams, the chief economist at Comerica Bank. “I would expect that probably businesses will slow-walk filling open positions before they actually pull job postings.”
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