Jobless rate hits 8.2%. 'Missing workers' make the situation look better than it is

In the weakest job report in 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday that the economy created a mere 69,000 seasonally adjusted net new jobs in May. The official "headline" unemployment rate'known as U3'rose to 8.2 percent. An alternative measure labeled U6'which includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't find any, and some but not all of the millions of people who have become too discouraged to look for work'rose from 14.5 percent to 14.8 percent.

One positive: The civilian labor force participation rate rose from 63.6 to 63.8 percent and the employment-population ratio rose from 58.4 to 58.6 percent.

The number of Americans unemployed for six months or more rose from 5.1 million to 5.4 million. Making matters worse, revisions changed growth in payroll employment in March from 154,000 to 143,000 and in April from 115,000 to 77,000.

(Calculated Risk) It was the third month in a row that the economy created a disappointingly low number of jobs. This indicates that the upward trend in job creation of earlier this year has gone the way it did in 2011 and 2010. Three years after the official end of the Great Recession, 12.7 million Americans are officially out of work.

The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of business establishments and the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. The CPS provides data that determine the official "headline" unemployment rate, also known as U3. That's the number that is now at 8.2 percent.

The only other good news in the report was that the CPS showed 422,000 more Americans employed in May with 642,000 more now in the labor force. But those numbers are a reversal from recent reports.

(Continue reading below the fold)