Washington
U.S. employers added 943,000 jobs in July despite a surge in Covid-19 Delta variant cases, with the unemployment rate dropping to 5.4 percent, the U.S. Labor Department reported Saturday.
The latest data followed an upwardly revised job growth of 938,000 in June and 614,000 in May, according to the report released by the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The job growth in July marks a “noticeable pickup” from the average of 563,000 jobs over the previous six months, Peterson Institute for International Economics senior fellow and Harvard professor Jason Furman, and Harvard Kennedy School research associate Wilson Powell have said in an article.
Furman and Powell, however, noted that this still leaves the U.S. economy 7.6 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections.
“While the economy is still missing millions of jobs, the overall data is more consistent with a tight labor market in which demand for jobs was plentiful but supply remained constrained,” they said. —Xinhua
