The 437,000 jobs lost in June were spread throughout most U.S. industries, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 

Manufacturing employment fell by 136,000 in June, while employment in construction decreased by 79,000.  Job losses in professional and business services shot up in June, with the industry shedding 118,000 jobs. Retail trade employment was down by 21,000 in June.

Education and health care employment increased by 34,000, and employment in government dropped by 52,000 in June.

The overall unemployment rate increased to 9.5 percent in June, putting it at a 26-year high.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said today’s jobs data show that creating jobs is the key to a full economic recovery.

Congress and the Obama administration need to continue to remain focused on stimulus efforts to end the recession. Additionally, this is not just a problem in the United States, but at this stage, job loss is the vortex of the global economic crisis.  To address this problem we believe that all governments should focus an extra 1 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] for stimulus focused on job creation. 

The rate of job loss has been slowing, but even if that trend continues and the recession ends this year, the nation likely will confront a massive employment deficit of 10 million jobs and a long period of slow wage growth, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 

In the early 1990s, it took 15 months from the official end of the recession before the unemployment rate stopped rising—and 19 months after the end of the recession in the early 1980s. But it’s not sufficient for the unemployment rate to fall to turn around the economy. The number of new jobs created must keep up with population growth—that means 127,000 news jobs must be created a month, EPI says. 

In a June 30 conference call, EPI President Lawrence Mishel noted another trend that is slowing the recovery: stagnant wages. The BLS reported that wages continued to drop in June, with average weekly pay for nonmanagerial workers falling to $609.37, from $609.51. 

If the current recession ends with a return to the way things were before it began, Mishel says, working families won’t have much to celebrate.  “Even before the perfect storm hit Wall Street, housing, and the banks, the economy was already broken for workers.” 

That means our challenge won’t end when the recession does. Unless we fix our broken economy so that it will start to provide fair value for work again, working families will keep losing ground.