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- The US added 850,000 nonfarm payrolls in June.
- Leisure and hospitality added 343,000 jobs, the most of any major industry sector.
- The construction and financial activities industries both saw another month of job losses.
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June was another month of large employment gains for the leisure and hospitality industry.
The US added 850,000 nonfarm payrolls in June according to the latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This gain was above the median estimate from economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Leisure and hospitality, which was one of the hardest hit industries from the pandemic, made up a large portion of the gains with 343,000 jobs added in June. This means the industry made up 40% of job gains last month.
Job gains last month varied by major industry, as seen in the chart below. Construction and financial activities both lost jobs in June, employment in utilities was unchanged, and every other major industry saw some gain in employment.
Government followed behind leisure and hospitality with 188,000 jobs added last month. Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote on Twitter specifically about state and local government job gains, which added 193,000 jobs together.
Shierholz wrote it is "crucial" that these governments "use their ARP funds to refill those jobs" because there are still around 1 million fewer state and local government jobs in June than before the pandemic.
Many of the government job gains last month were in education. There were 155,000 jobs added in local government education and 75,000 in state government education.
However, it is important to note that those gains could be partly due to the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts data for seasonal patterns in the coronavirus pandemic. BLS wrote in the latest release that "Without the typical seasonal employment increases earlier, there were fewer layoffs at the end of the school year, resulting in job gains after seasonal adjustment."
Transportation and warehousing saw the smallest monthly gain in June among the major industries. The industry added 10,700 jobs last month but is 93,600, or 1.6%, below pre-pandemic employment.
Construction did not see as large as a decline in June as it did in May. In May, Construction shed 22,000 jobs. However, construction is still 3.1% below pre-pandemic employment. Within construction, construction of building did see an increase of 5,600 jobs, while heavy and civil engineering construction lost 10,900 jobs.
"I think that's something to keep an eye on in the months ahead as we see what's going on with the housing market and how that passes through to the labor market in the form of jobs in the construction sector," Bunker told Insider.