Unemployment up, recent stats show

Yet there were some mixed messages in the May figures. Notably, the unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent, from a five-decade low of 3.4 percent in April. It’s the highest unemployment rate since October. (The government compiles the unemployment data using a different survey than the one used to calculate job gains, and the two surveys sometimes conflict.)

Is the labor market as strong as the gain of 339,000 jobs suggests? Probably not. In May, employers added the most jobs since January. So the overall picture is an encouraging one. Yet there are signs that hiring is cooling from the super-heated levels of the past two years.

For one thing, the length of the average work week declined, to 34.3 hours from 34.4 in April. That is a seemingly small drop, but economists said it’s equivalent to cutting several hundred thousand jobs. It means that, on average, weekly paychecks will be slightly smaller. The average work week is down from 34.6 hours a year ago.

Hourly wage growth also dipped in May, evidence that many businesses feel less pressure to dangle higher pay to find and keep workers. Average hourly pay increased 4.3 percent from a year earlier. That’s down from gangbusters gains of nearly 6 percent a year ago.

And the rise in the unemployment rate partly reflected higher layoffs. This suggested that not everyone who lost jobs in recent high-profile layoffs by banks, tech firms and media companies has found new work.