Canada’s unemployment rate at 6.8% for sixth month

In July, the US economy added 215,000 jobs while the unemployment rate held steady at 5.3%.

French industrial output declined unexpectedly in June after rising in the previous month, the statistical office Insee reported Friday.

The overall story in this report is moderately positive, but still indicates the labor market has a long way to go to recover from the downturn.

More layoffs in the high paying energy sector, which is grappling with the continuing deep dive in Crude Oil prices, were a drag on mining payrolls, which shed 4,000 jobs in July. The median duration of unemployment spells remained constant, while the average duration and share of long-term unemployment both increased slightly, but were still below May levels. The number of unemployed persons is down by 1.4 million this year.

Despite the increase, London remains below the national average, which held steady at 6.8 per cent for the sixth month in a row. The rates for adult men, adult women, whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics showed little or no change.

So what is the real unemployment rate? The number of full-time jobs fell by 17,300. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. Conversely, Quebec has seen a decrease of 0.3 percentage point in the unemployment rate, reaching 7.7% due to the creation of 22,000 jobs in July.

Year-over-year, Canada gained over 161,000 jobs. This continues to debunk Republican charges that Obamacare is killing jobs.

At this time last year the jobless rate for London-St. Manufacturing posted healthier job gains at 15,000 after a sluggish June.

He suggested that shift could be related to changes in the accommodation and food services sector.

Another long-standing employment problem is also slowly- very slowly-going away. Earlier in the recovery, workers over age 55 had accounted for the bulk of growth in employment. Since a recent high in December 2014, employment in the industry has declined by 78,000.

The Canadian economy was expected to gain 5.3K jobs in July following a loss of 6.4K jobs back in June.

While 6,600 net new jobs were added across Canada in July, they were all part-time.