WASHINGTON — The job market is defying history.
A dismal June employment report shows employers adding nowhere near as many jobs as they normally do this long after a recession has ended.
Unemployment has climbed for three consecutive months and is now at 9.2 percent. There’s no precedent, in data going back to 1948, for such a high rate two years into what economists say is a recovery.
The economy added just 18,000 jobs in June. That’s a fraction of the 90,000 economists had expected and a sliver of the 300,000 needed each month to shrink unemployment rapidly.
Friday’s report forced analysts to re-examine their assumption that the economy would strengthen in the second half of 2011.
They had expected improvement in June after a bleak jobs report for May. They figured that hiring in May had been artificially weakened by temporary factors — a run-up in gasoline prices to $4 a gallon and factory disruptions caused by Japan’s earthquake and nuclear crisis.
But the June numbers were even worse than May’s, even though gasoline prices are falling and factories revving up again.
“This is a remarkable, across-the-board backslide,” says economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute.
Disappointing economic reports sometimes look better on closer inspection. This one gets uglier.
Workers’ hourly pay fell in June. They worked fewer hours. And 16.2 percent of those who wanted to work were either unemployed, forced to settle for part-time jobs or had given up looking for work. That was up from 15.8 percent in May.
