June’s unemployment rate, in one word: Unchanged

• 8.2% unemployment rate in June (it’s unchanged)

• 80k number of jobs created in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report
• 77k number of jobs created in May, based on revised numbers; June was a marginal improvement
• 100k number of jobs economists expected to be created in June; the sound of failure source

» Does little improvement = decline? That’s Ezra Klein’s argument on the report. “In this economy, little or no change isn’t good enough,” he says. “We added 80,000 jobs in June. That’s not enough to keep up with population growth. So, in the context of our growing workforce, the labor market lost ground last month.”

» Editor’s note: And because this comes up EVERY SINGLE MONTH, the unemployment rate above is the U3 unemployment rate, the standard that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. If you use the U6 unemployment rate (which includes people unemployed but not currently looking for work, or working part-time for economic reasons), it jumps to 14.9 percent, which is up from last month.

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