217,000 jobs were added in may. the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.3%. let s bring in our analyst joining us from new york. the markets, it looks like the dow jones right now going up a bit. maybe we ll show our viewer what s happening right now. it s up, what, about 73. another 200,000-plus new jobs created last month. absolutely, i mean, this is now four months of really strong jobs reports. what s good about this one is the job gains were really broad-based. they were across all sectors. manufacturing, retail, trade, tourism, health care, everything. you know, the two areas of concern, though, it must be said, are that the major growth is still in lower wage jobs, and wage growth overall is only about 2%. that s about half of what it was in the precrisis era. that still has economists concerned. the fact that another 200,000-plus jobs created, but
and that is where the jobs are right now. and you are always tend to have a unique take on these jobs reports, and what is yours on this one? and the professional services one, which is a grab bag of secretarial work or janitorial work, but it is not great and meaning that it is not particularly high-paying job health care jobs are orderlies and not registered nurses and the lower end of the wage scale in health care services, and this is like the past few months if you think that the economy is glass half full, you can find some evidence in this report, and cup half empty, well, you can see it that the work week is down and the labor participation which means that the people who are statistically looking for woman is at lows in more than 20 years. and folks that have just completely stopped looking. and 2 million people are now in the workforce than true in 2009 2009, and so we have recovered a
things that we might do, i want to talk about something that s completely noncontroversial, like the minimum wage, the restaurant industry is hiring a lot of folks, those folks are largely working at minimum wage. if we were politically able to raise the minimum wage to that $10.10, what would that do to future jobs reports? it would not be very good. according to the congressional budget office, which is hardly the research department of the republican national committee. it wouldn t cause us to lose 500,000 jobs. how could that happen? the waiter in the upscale manhattan restaurant, he would keep his job. mcdonald s are more likely to go to the kind of check outs that walmart has, you would there is a real potential for job losses and that s why i think that we need to go at this a different way than just to
public is hanging on these job numbers. i think the american public hangs on things like the results of dancing with the stars or the final four. as much as i would love if they did because it would be great for people like annie and myself and you, i think that they don t hang on every jot and tittle of political and economic news that comes out. i think what typically happens there s a perception. things are getting better, things are staying the same, things are getting worse. three or four straight months of good jobs reports, the coverage of the jobs reports winds up being sort of this is moving in the right direction, i think takes away the nightmare scenario for democrats in the 2014 mid-terms, which is the bottom totally falls out, president obama is not at all popular, obamacare is not at all popular, and people s perceptions that the economy is bad you re looking at a really bad situation for democrats. i think if you continue to see what annie pointed out, which is sort of a
what voters think, i would think the issue of jobs is a more front and center media concern than immediate concern than climate change. whatever people s views are on climate change. that is a very, very, pressing and immediate threat to us. it is. and if you look at the last three months, the jobs reports were disappointing. the jobs report last month, you probable live have commented on this we had fewer people getting new jobs than we had people entering the ranks of the long-term unemployed. over 27 weeks. so things are not going well. we have labor force participation we talk about at record levels for men in the 1940s when we started keeping records, for all americans 1970s, we have a real problem. not just in creating jobs bus creating good jobs. so you have seen working families see their paycheck goes down as their healthcare cost goes up and that s the middle