June Employment and Unemployment: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a report today on payroll employment and unemployment for June (pdf summary available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf).
Highlights of the report:

Unemployment Rate

• The unemployment rate held steady at 8.2% in June. 
• The number of long-term unemployed (those unemployed for 27 weeks or longer) was little changed at 5.4 million in June.  The percent of long-term unemployed was 41.9% in June. 
• The labor force rose by 156,000 in June, following a gain of 642,000 in May. The labor force participation rate held steady at 63.8% in June.

Payroll Employment

• Total non-farm payroll employment rose by 80,000 in June, following gains of 77,000 in May (revised upwards from 69,000) and 68,000 in April (revised downwards from 77,000).  June’s gain of 80,000 was lower than the expected gain of about 100,000 jobs and below the 130,000 necessary to keep pace with healthy labor force growth.
• Job growth in the second quarter of 2012 averaged 75,000 per month, compared to average growth of 226,000 per month in the first quarter of the year.
• Private sector employment rose by 84,000 while government employment fell by 4,000.
• Some of the gains came from professional and business services (+47,000), health care (+13,000), manufacturing (+11,000), management and technical consulting (+9,000), and computer systems design and related services (+7,000).
• The average workweek for all private nonfarm employees edged up 0.1 hours to 34.5 hours.