The new jobs numbers are a mild disappointment, with emphasis on the mild. Yes, the total of 209,000 jobs reported to have been added to United States payrolls was a bit below the 230,000 economists were expecting, and well below the revised 298,000 of June. And yes, the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.2 percent from 6.1 percent.  But those numbers are hardly the stuff of catastrophe, and the fine print Friday was more positive. Revisions to previous months’ job growth numbers were slightly positive, for example, and the unemployment rate rose because some 329,000 people joined the labor force, driving up the labor force participation rate a bit.  The result: Nothing about these numbers should change your basic assessment of how the economy is doing, unless you had some outlandish view of how the economy was doing to begin with. Gradual, steady expansion in the job market, and the economy more broadly, continues apace.  That doesn’t mean we can’t pick apart the new numbers for some insight into how things are evolving. Here are the key trends to know.  First, the most basic of numbers: American employers reported having an additional 209,000 jobs on their payrolls in July. While that was below forecasts, it is comfortably within the range of job creation of the last few years.  More than 200,000 jobs have been added each month for the past six months.  Month–over–month change in nonfarm payroll employment, in thousands  Month–over–month change in nonfarm payroll employment, in thousands  And the uptick in the unemployment rate also was not enough to undo a sharp fall over recent months. The overall trend in the jobless rate is decisively downward.  Despite rising slightly in July, the unemployment rate remains below May levels and far below levels of a year ago.  But of course the unemployment rate doesn’t tell the full story. The jobless rate can rise for both good reasons (more people looking for work) and bad reasons (fewer people having a job).  This is a month in which the uptick was for good reasons, with the aforementioned 329,000 increase in the labor force. While that drove the portion of Americans in the labor force (that is, either with a job or looking for one) up to 62.9 percent, it remains far below levels of just a year or two ago.  The proportion of Americans who are in the labor force — who either have a job or are looking for one — has fallen sharply over the last five years. (It rose slightly last month.)  Labor force participation rate (in percent)  Labor force participation rate (in percent)  But where is this job growth coming from? The numbers in the latest report were amazingly broad-based, with no major sector of the economy shedding positions. The strongest gains were in professional and business services.  July change in employment by industry sector, in thousands  July change in employment by industry sector, in thousands  But what about worker pay? There, the news out of the latest report remains mediocre. The average length of the workweek for private sector workers was unchanged at 34.5 hours. Average hourly earnings ticked up only a penny, to $24.45 an hour (don’t spend it all in one place).  The increase amounts to one penny per hour.  Average hourly private sector wage, percent change over year earlier  Average hourly private sector wage, percent change over year earlier  Add it all up, and average weekly earnings rose only a trivial amount, up 35 cents a week, or four one-hundreths of a percent. Inflation data for July has not been published yet, but based on recent readings, the 2 percent gain in private-sector hourly pay over the last 12 months is barely enough to keep up with rising prices. A new report Friday, for example, showed a 1.7 percent rise in consumer prices for the 12 months ended in June.  And for a rare bonus sixth chart (for something we only noticed after our initial pass through the report), take a look at the payroll employment gains over the past year. Since 2012, the number has bounced around between 2 million and 2.5 million. But with the July report, the number has finally broken out of that range and recorded a 12-month job gain of 2.57 million.  Change in payroll employment, year–over–year, in thousands  Change in payroll employment, year–over–year, in thousands  That is the speediest rate of job creation for any 12-month period in the current expansion, and is a pace of job creation last exceeded in the 12 months ended in April 2006. Progress has been glacially slow, but the pace of job creation is indeed on a gradual upward trend.
Although the number of jobs added to payrolls in July was slightly less than expected, there is better news in the fine print.