Hiring picked up slightly in July and the U.S. unemployment rate dipped to 9.1 percent. The modest improvement may quiet fears of another recession after the worst losses on Wall Street in nearly three years, The Associated Press Reports.
Employers added 117,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That’s better than the past two months, which were also revised higher.
The gains gave the stock market a small lift one day after the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 500 points. Stock futures turned positive Friday after the report was released. The report “should lessen fears that the recovery is truly faltering,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief economist at MFÂ Global.
Still, the economy needs twice as many net jobs per month to rapidly reduce unemployment. The rate has topped 9 percent in every month except two since the recession officially ended in June 2009.
Businesses added 154,000 jobs across many industries. Governments cut 37,000 jobs last month. Still, 23,000 of those losses were almost entirely because of the shutdown of Minnesota’s state government.
The unemployment rate fell from 9.2 percent in June partly because some unemployed workers stopped looking for work. That means they are no longer counted as unemployed.
As a result, the number of unemployed people fell to 13.9 million, down from 14.1 million. Still, that’s nearly double the total before the recession.
The participation rate, which measures the percentage of people working or searching for jobs, fell to 63.9 percent, the lowest in 27Â years.
