The Recovery Is Losing Steam

Forget about the drop in the unemployment rate last month. The economic recovery has lost significant steam in the last few months.

Today’s employment report is clear on that score. Job growth in the private sector has slowed — to 83,000 last month and a three-month average of 119,000. From February to April, the private sector added 154,000 jobs a month. (With the Census winding down, the federal government cut jobs last month, which explains the drop in overall employment.)

And unlike in May, when private-sector job growth slowed but the workweek got longer, employers cut hours last month, too. Total hours worked last month fell in June for the first time since February.

Average hourly pay dropped, too, to $22.53 in June, from $22.55 in May. It’s still higher than it was a few months ago — and higher than it was when the recession began in December 2007, surprisingly enough — but it’s no longer moving in the right direction.

All these numbers come from the Labor Department’s survey of businesses, which is larger and more reliable than the survey of households. But the household survey gave essentially the same picture. It showed a big jump (more than 800,000) in the number of people outside the labor force — neither working nor looking for work. That’s the only reason that the unemployment rate fell, to 9.5 percent from 9.7 percent.

I want to reiterate this point: the unemployment rate fell last month even though actual unemployment did not fall. Only official unemployment — the share of people actively looking for work — fell.

To the extent that the report offered any silver linings, they included a drop in the number of people working part time because they could not find full-time work (to 8.6 million, from 8.8 million). The report also suggested that private-sector job growth isn’t quite as bad as last month’s report indicated. History suggests that true job growth may also be a bit better than the Labor Department is estimating; that’s the usual pattern in the early stages of a recovery.

The overall picture isn’t so much of a double-dip recession as it is of a badly wounded economy recovering at a slow pace.

But that’s not much to get excited about it. If the Senate and the Federal Reserve were waiting for more information to decide whether the economy needed more help, they just got it.