May Unemployment Data

The Department of Labor has released its employment data for May and, as has become the norm the last few months, there's good news and bad news.  The good news is that the unemployment rate decreased to 9.7% in May, from 9.9% in the previous month.  Moreover, the underemployment rate also went down to 16.6% from 17.1% in the previous month.  These numbers are largely the result of 431,000 new jobs.  However, the bad news:  most of those jobs (411,000 of them) were temporary ones with the Census. 

-JH