The news of the unemployment rate going up yet again in June was a popular--though not popular, if you catch our drift--topic over the weekend.  We were late in getting to the Department of Labor's official report, so we'll share it now. 

In short, unemployment rate has rose slightly to 9.2%.  The US economy managed to add only 18,000 jobs during the month.  Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report:

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged in June at 8.6 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

In June, 2.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Among the marginally attached, there were 982,000 discouraged workers in June, down by 225,000 from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in June had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

Read the full report from the BLS here.

So 18,000 jobs is clearly not enough to keep up with the population growth.  How many jobs would we need to simply keep the unemployment rate where it is?  Bill McBride, the blogger known as Calculated Risk, does the math and estimates it will take between 95,000 and 187,000 new jobs.  Read the full post here.