(Updated, 12 p.m.)
WASHINGTON – The national unemployment rate fell in May, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday, but employers added fewer jobs than expected in a sign the job market remains weak.
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The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent last month, down two-tenths of a percentage point from April, as 322,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force.
A separate survey showed payrolls increased by 431,000 in May, most of which was due to the hiring of 411,000 temporary workers for the decennial Census. Payrolls had grown by 290,000 in April.
Private sector employment increased by 41,000 last month, with payrolls growing in manufacturing, temporary-help services and mining. Private payrolls had increased by much more in April, with the addition of 218,000 jobs.
Economists had predicted employment would rise by 536,000 in May, with larger gains in the private sector, according to the median forecast in a poll by Bloomberg News.
“Job growth is going to be anemic,” Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., told Bloomberg Radio. “Remember, it requires 150,000 to 200,000 jobs in order to reduce that unemployment rate, which is a key focus for the administration.”
A total of 15 million Americans were unemployed last month, out of a national work force of 154.4 million.
“We really aren’t adding many jobs,” Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics LLC in Boulder, Colorado, told Bloomberg before the report was released. “We’ve lost some momentum in the economy and final sales clearly aren’t enough to generate job growth.”
The unemployment rate in Rhode Island was 12.5 percent in April, the most recent month for which figures are available, according to the R.I. Department of Labor and Training.
