NJ Unemployment Dips In May

From the Star Ledger:

Garden State growing jobs

New Jersey employers created 6,900 jobs in May as the unemployment rate declined from 5.1 percent to 5 percent, state labor officials said Tuesday in an upbeat jobs report.

The unemployment rate was higher than the national rate of 4.6 percent. But the pace of job creation was stronger in the state than in the nation in May, when the United States added just 75,000 jobs.


"This is an encouraging number, particularly given the weak gains that the national economy had in May," said Joseph J. Seneca, a Rutgers University economist and chairman of the state Council of Economic Advisers.

"Four straight months of job gains and record-high employment levels are good signs for our economy," said David J. Socolow, acting commissioner of the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Economists were especially encouraged that all of May's job gains came in the private sector. Those jobs are considered more valuable because they create tax revenues, rather than use them, and they are considered a better barometer of overall economic health than government jobs.
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Jobs also were added in education and health services, as well as in leisure and hospitality. Manufacturing, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past several decades, continued to slide.

Government jobs fell by 800 and information jobs declined by 500.

Construction was unchanged. Higher interest rates have cooled a red-hot housing market, putting the lid on construction hiring.