By Noreen Burke
Investing.com - The U.S. private sector added 2.36 million jobs in June, according to a report by payrolls processor ADP, as businesses reopened after closing in mid-March to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Analysts polled by Investing.com had expected the private sector to have added 3 million jobs last month.
May’s figure was revised to show job gains of 3.065 million from the decline of 2.7 million that was initially reported.
“Small business hiring picked up in the month of June,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “As the economy slowly continues to recover, we are seeing a significant rebound in industries that once experienced the greatest job losses. In fact, 70 percent of the jobs added this month were in the leisure and hospitality, trade and construction industries.”
On Tuesday Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that while recent signs of improvement including a surprise gain in employment and a record rise in retail sales last month are encouraging, the damage inflicted by forced economic shutdowns to curb the spread of the virus has left a very deep hole to fill, especially on the employment front.
The ADP numbers come ahead of the Labor Department's nonfarm payrolls report for June on Thursday, which includes both public and private-sector employment. The government jobs data is being released a day earlier than usual because of the Independence Day holiday.
That report is expected to show that the unemployment rate ticked down to around 12.3% last month from 13.3% in May with employers forecast to have added 3 million jobs, up from 2.5 million in May. While that would be a second month of record gains the overall trend remains unclear amid widespread data collection issues.
At the same time, Thursday’s weekly jobless claims report is expected to show another surge of new claims for unemployment benefits.
Initial weekly claims for unemployment benefits have been stuck around 1.5 million, though applications have dropped from a record high of 6.86 million reached at the end of March.
--Reuters contributed to this report