THE NEW YORK TIMES: A shadow fell across America’s economic recovery on Friday, as the Labor Department’s monthly report showed that job growth was weak in the private sector, provoking a precipitous sell-off in the stock market.
The headline numbers for May suggested reason for optimism — employers added 431,000 jobs and the jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent, from 9.9 percent in April. But the underlying numbers showed that almost all of the growth came from the 411,000 workers hired by the federal government to help with the Census. Most of those jobs will end in a few months.
By contrast, the private sector created 41,000 positions, far short of expectations for 150,000 to 180,000 jobs. And the number of long-term unemployed, those Americans out of work for 27 or more weeks, remained at its highest level since the Labor Department began collecting such data in the 1940s. >>> Michael Powell | Friday, June 04, 2010
