The government also reported that the private sector managed to add 83,000 new jobs last month.
The lack of a significant number of new jobs, following over 200,000 private-sector additions in February, March and April, is a reflection of the slowdown in an already fragile and uneven economic recovery.
As I’ve repeated often in my commentaries, weekly jobless claims have jumped and have been holding well above 400,000, and the much slower pace of new jobs should not come as a surprise.
As the chart above reveals, the nasty recession has created a gaping hole in the labor force that is far more severe than we saw in the tough recessions that marked the mid 1970s and early 1980s.
And the shallow and uneven recovery has left many wandering in the unemployment line.
Charts 3 highlights the pace of job creation that followed the end of each of the major recessions over the last five years.
Chart 4 compares job creation during the current economic recovery with those that followed the relatively mild contractions during 1991 and 2001.
Although there has been rising chatter that the current soft patch may turn into something more ominous, the latest look at the service sector by the Institute for Supply Management out today suggests that a new recession is not imminent.
Relatively stable jobless claims, though elevated, are not signaling a new contraction either.
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