The American job machine has jammed. Again.
The economy added only 80,000 jobs in June, the government said Friday, erasing any doubt that the United States is in a summer slump for the third year in a row.
“Let’s just agree: This number stinks,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at the investment firm BTIG.
It was the third consecutive month of weak job growth. From April through June, the economy produced an average of just 75,000 jobs a month, the weakest quarter since July through September 2010.
The unemployment rate stayed at 8.2 percent — a recession-level figure, even though the recession technically has been over for three years.
The numbers could hurt President Barack Obama’s odds for re-election. Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican nominee, said they showed that Obama, in 3ƒ years on the job, had not “gotten America working again.”
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“And the president is going to have to stand up and take responsibility for it,” Romney said Friday in Wolfeboro, N.H. “This kick in the gut has got to end.”
Obama, on a two-day bus tour through the contested states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, focused on private companies, which added 84,000 jobs in June, and took a longer view of the economy recovery.
“Businesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months, including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs,” the president said. “That’s a step in the right direction.”
Still, he added it’s not enough and the country needs to do better than even just returning to where it was before the recession began in 2007.
In the Quad-Cities, congressional candidates also sparred over who is to blame, although all agreed the report was disappointing.
Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, suggested congressmen cut short the time they plan to spend in their districts between August and November. That’s a time when lawmakers normally would be campaigning. Loebsack said only 12 days would be spent legislating.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” he said Friday.
Congress needs to pass more legislation like the two-year highway bill, and he noted there’s a farm bill pending, too.
“There’s a number of different pieces to this puzzle,” he said.
Rep. Bobby Schilling, R-Ill., pointed to bills that have passed the House but haven’t moved in the Senate. Most have to do with rolling back regulations, some substantially.
“I think the big thing is to get some of the stuff there passed,” he said.
Their challengers see Congress — particularly their opponents — as the problem.
John Archer, the Bettendorf lawyer who is seeking Loebsack’s job, said new leadership is needed. He has proposed eliminating taxes on overseas corporate profits and said Friday that uncertainty in the market needs to be drained.
“That’s how you stimulate jobs,” he said.
Democrat Cheri Bustos, who is challenging Schilling, pointed to a Freeport, Ill., company, Sensata Technologies, that is moving jobs to China, saying the country’s tax policy is out of whack.
“There’s no disincentive to use labor that’s cheaper,” she said Friday.
The company, which is located in northern Illinois and owned by Bain Capital, said last year it was laying off 170 people over two years. The area’s congressman, Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Ill., along with Schilling, sent a letter to the company Friday asking owners to change its mind.
Bustos also said congressional Republicans, including her opponent, aren’t helping, particularly as they prepare next week to vote on repealing the health-care law the Supreme Court just upheld.
“He’s marching in lockstep with his obstructionist leadership in Congress,” she said.
Schilling’s campaign has scoffed at Bustos’ jobs ideas, including her plan to create a “manufacturing triangle” to promote the industry in the Quad-Cities, Peoria and Rockford. The Schilling camp calls it nothing more than a marketing scheme.
Republicans, meanwhile, have said the health-care law is causing uncertainty among employers.
The Labor Department’s report on job creation and unemployment is the most closely watched monthly indicator of the U.S. economy. There are four reports remaining before Election Day, including one on the Friday before Americans vote.
No president since World War II has faced re-election with unemployment above 8 percent. It was 7.8 percent when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Ronald Reagan faced 7.2 percent unemployment in 1984 and trounced Walter Mondale.
Patrick Sims, director of research at the consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies, said that “time has run out” for unemployment to fall below 8 percent by Election Day.
That would require an average of 219,000 jobs a month from July through October — more like the economy’s performance from January through March, when it averaged 226,000 per month.
Few economic analysts expect anything close to that.
“The labor market is treading water,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She called it an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American work force.”
In the Quad-Cities, it will be another few weeks before the June jobs and unemployment figures are released. This area, with a May jobless rate of 6.7 percent, is doing better than the country as a whole, but it has struggled to create jobs over the past year.
In May, the Quad-Cities had 179,300 non-farm jobs, down 1,400 from the previous month and 3,500 from the previous May. The jobless rate has shrunk, but so has the size of the labor force, which may explain some of the decline.
The biggest hit to the area’s jobs base over the past year has come in the professional and business services, construction and mining and federal government sectors. The manufacturing sector has held fairly steady, but it’s gained only 400 jobs since the previous May to stand at 23,800.
The Labor Department report put investors in a sour mood.
The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 124 points. Industrial and materials companies, which depend on economic growth, were among the stocks that fell the most. The price of oil fell $2.77 per barrel to $84.45.
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Money flowed instead into U.S. Treasurys, which investors perceive as safer than stocks when the economy is weakening. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 1.54 percent, from 1.59 percent on Thursday.
Investors already were worried about a debt crisis that has gripped Europe for almost three years and recent signals that the powerhouse economy of China is slowing.
Earlier this week, the European Central Bank and the central bank of China cut interest rates in hopes of encouraging people and businesses to borrow and spend money.
For American investors, however, the jobs report fell into an uncomfortable middle ground.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke promised earlier this month that the Federal Reserve would take additional steps to help the economy “if we’re not seeing a sustained improvement in the labor market.”
But some financial analysts said that the Labor Department report, which disappointing, was not weak enough to lock in further action by the Fed at its next meeting July 31 and Aug. 1.
June’s dud of a number made it clear that the economy has fallen into the same pattern it followed in 2010 and 2011: It gets off to a relatively fast start, then fades at midyear.
Offering some hope, the slowdowns in each of the two previous years lasted four months, and they were worse than this year’s has been.
From June through September 2010, the economy lost an average of 75,000 jobs per month. From May through August 2011, the economy added an average of 80,000 per month. This year, the four-month average gain since March is 92,000.
But the United States still is suffering the hangover of a financial crisis and the worst recession since the 1930s. The economy lost 8.8 million jobs during and after the recession. It has regained 3.8 million.
The economy isn’t growing fast enough to create jobs at a healthy clip. That is primarily because three traditional pistons of economic recovery aren’t firing the way they normally do:
n Consumer spending since the recession has been weaker than it was in any post-World War II recovery. Workers’ pay raises have been chewed up by rising prices. And households are trying to pay off the debt they ran up in the mid-2000s.
n Housing has been a dead weight on the economy for six years. Even record low mortgage rates haven’t helped much. Home prices have dropped 30 percent and $7 trillion worth of home equity has vanished since 2006.
n Government, which usually picks up the slack in the job market when the economy is weak, isn’t helping this time. Counting federal, state and local jobs, governments have cut 637,000 jobs since 2008. They have cut 49,000 since March.
In the first three months of this year, it appeared state and local government job losses were coming to an end, said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial.
“That turned out to be a temporary halt,” he said. “Apparently, there’s no end in sight.”
The unemployment rate last month was unchanged from May. But a broader measure of weakness in the labor market, the so-called underemployment rate, deteriorated for the second straight month.
In June, 14.9 percent of Americans either were unemployed, had given up looking for work or had been forced to settle for part-time employment. The rate was 14.8 percent in May and 14.5 percent in April.