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Health care remained a resilient sector for jobs in July even as the broader labor market showed further signs of slowing, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday shows.
Health care and social assistance saw 73,300 jobs added last month, far and away the most growth of any group in the period. When including private education with the health-care group, as some economists do, that growth would have increased to 79,000 for the month.
Nonfarm payrolls in July grew by 73,000, meaning that health care accounted for virtually all of those gains when factoring in the job declines from other spaces. Put differently, last month’s jobs report would’ve been negative overall if the health-care group were to be excluded.
“When you have health care and social assistance essentially doing the lifting on private payrolls growth [and] federal government and government both shedding jobs here where the local government had sort of previously helped on the June participation, you have to say that … there’s a substantial part of it that is essentially frozen,” Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, told CNBC. “It’s almost a no-hire, no-fire job market.”
June and May also saw steep downward revisions, with the former being revised to an increase of 14,000 from 147,000 and the latter dropping to a mere 19,000 from 144,000. Those changes indicate that jobs growth has been quietly dwindling for months. Still, there are some areas that are growing.
The BLS said that social assistance’s trend upward demonstrated “continued job growth in individual and family services,” which rose by approximately 21,000. Job growth in ambulatory health care services and hospitals were similarly strong, climbing by 34,000 and 16,000.
Health care and social assistance’s total figure was 57,600 more than retail trade, which had the second highest number of additions. That group saw 15,700 jobs added during the month.
Closely behind retail trade was financial activities, a category that had 15,000 gains.
In contrast, more than half of the groups posted declines in the monthly period. Of the seven out of 13 sectors that pulled back, professional and business services led the way, falling by 14,000 in payrolls.
The government sector, which had initially bolstered gains in June, shed 10,000 jobs in July.
Other notable categories like manufacturing and wholesale trade took a dive alongside government and professional and business services. Manufacturing lost 11,000 positions, while wholesale trade dipped by 7,800.
“This report absolutely raises a red flag,” Hamrick said. “We have another jobs report to come before the mid-September [Federal Reserve] meeting, but I think we’ll now be scouring the landscape – the data landscape and the anecdotal landscape – to see whether this slowing economy story is one that is more consistent.”
