Washington, July 2 (IANS) As the US economy lost 125,000 jobs in June, President Barack Obama called it a ‘stark turn around’ from the height of recession, asserting that the US was ‘headed in the right direction’.
The June employment report ‘reflected the planned phase-out of 225,000 temporary census jobs’, he said as the Labour Department Friday reported a net loss of jobs for the first time this year.
‘But it also showed the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector. All told, our economy has created nearly 600,000 private sector jobs this year,’ he said.
‘That’s a stark turn around from the first six months of last year, when we lost 3.7 million jobs at the height of the recession,’ Obama said.
‘Make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction, but as I was reminded on a trip to Racine, Wisconsin earlier this week, we’re not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans. We’re not headed there fast enough for me either.’
‘The recession dug us a hole of about 8 million jobs deep and we continue to fight headwinds from volatile global markets. So we still have a great deal of work to do to repair the economy and get the American people back to work,’ Obama added.
Even as census jobs that had swelled payrolls by 433,000 net jobs in May were lost, business hiring rebounded to 83,000, which was a bit weaker than hoped, from a revised total of 33,000 jobs in May, according to the government report.
State and local governments cut 10,000 jobs in the month. That and the gain of 27,000 non-census jobs by the federal government, led to the overall loss of 125,000 jobs. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a loss of 100,000 jobs in June.
The unemployment rate fell to 9.5 percent from 9.7 percent in May. Economists cited by CNN had forecast it would climb to 9.8 percent. But the improvement was due mostly to many discouraged job seekers not bothering to look for work and no longer being counted as part of the labour force.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
