"This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007," Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the institute, said in the analysis.
Although the June numbers were worse than expected, the trend in recent months still points to moderating job losses.
"This is still a diminution, but obviously we wish it had been better," Romer said, adding later that "my hope and expectation is that we go back to that pattern."
From April through June, the monthly average job losses were 436,000, an improvement from the monthly average from November through March of 670,000.
"Job losses still in moderating trend; declining hours worked, flat wages point up risks that recovery stalls," Alan Levenson, the chief economist for investment manager T. Rowe Price, said in a statement to investors.
Bureau statisticians also revised the initial numbers in the April and May reports, saying that layoffs in May were smaller than first thought: 322,000, rather than the reported 345,000. For April, however, the job cuts were deeper: 519,000, instead of the 504,000 initially reported.
Leading the job-losing sectors in June was manufacturing, which shed 136,000 jobs. Construction companies trimmed another 79,000 positions. In a bad harbinger for housing, the business and professional services sector, which comprises white-collar workers who are more likely than not to be homeowners, lost 118,000 positions. Retailers axed another 21,000 jobs, while education and leisure and hospitality slimmed down by 18,000 posts. In a surprise, government employment fell by 52,000, and the only sector with a net addition of jobs was education and health services.
In a trend that isn't showing signs of improving, the BLS reported Friday that the number of long-term unemployed _ people who've been jobless for 27 weeks or more _ rose by 433,000 over the month to 4.4 million. It means that as of June, three out of every 10 Americans who are out of work have been jobless for half a year or more.
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