217,000 new jobs were created in May

Jobs day is usually a frenzy of digging through the data for either signs of impending doom or glimmers of hope. But there wasn’t a lot to get really excited or really upset about in the May jobs report.

And that may be good news. Or as Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the CBO and president of the right-leaning American Action Forum, tweeted Friday:

The jobs report today said employers added 217,000 jobs to their payrolls in May, and that number will be widely reported. But that number is nowhere near the actual number of jobs that employers created, thanks to seasonal adjustment.

The government tweaks the data each month to show how many jobs were created, minus the effects of regular occurrences like holiday shopping and summer travel. However, the recession threw that off, and it took years for the report to correct itself. Jonathan Wright, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a paper earlier this year that proposes a new seasonal adjustment system. Vox talked to him about how to improve the jobs report.

As Matt Yglesias reported just a few minutes ago, the US in May hit the number of jobs it had prior to the recession. That’s great news, but it only means we’ve climbed out of a massive hole. Had job growth continued unabated instead of being tanked by the recession, there would be millions more jobs, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reports today:

So what it means to hit that prerecession peak is to start back at zero, after six years. That’s a very long time to have waited, and it means we would have otherwise been way better off now than prior to the recession...possibly, better off to the tune of 7 million jobs, in fact.

U.S. employers added 217,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s almost exactly in line with consensus expectations, which had been around 213,000. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained unchanged, at 6.3 percent.

The only industries that subtracted jobs last month were information industry, which includes telecommunications, as well as publishing. That industry lost 5,000 jobs. Nondurable goods manufacturing also lost 7,000 jobs, but manufacturing as a whole grew by 10,000. Meanwhile, healthcare and social assistance helped lead the way in job growth, with nearly 55,000 new jobs. That industry has been a bright spot in the recovery, with virtually uninterrupted growth throughout the recession. The broad professional and business services category, which includes workers like accountants and lawyers, also grew by 55,000 workers.

This is it, the long-awaited jobs report at which we find out that more Americans are employed than were before the recession started:

Of course given population growth this is very much defining success down.

Economists polled by Reuters are expecting that tomorrow’s BLS data will tell us the economy added 218,000 new jobs in May. That would be a pretty good result, but still a bit of a slowdown from April.

Tomorrow’s Labor Department report on the state of the job market is very likely to be a special one — the report that tells us more Americans are now at work than were before the recession hit.

Back in January of 2008, we had 138,365,000 jobs. As of April, we were at 138,252,000 jobs. That jobs gap of 114,000 jobs is very narrow and an even vaguely healthy economy should be able to add that much in May. Continued declines in the number of people filing for unemployment insurance suggests that nothing terrible happened in May and we should expect to beat the January 2008 number. That will mean more people are at work than at any time before in American history.