Unemployment vs. non-farm job creationSource: BLS Data

July’s jobs report indicated a continued move sideways for the U.S. labor market. While unemployment crept up to 5.7%, mainly due to new entrants into the job market looking for work, job losses decreased from last month and came in below estimates at 51,000.

While the loss of jobs is never good news, it’s also not necessarily as negative as may be perceived. When you consider that there are currently over 154 million people in the U.S. workforce, 51,000 jobs is an extremely small portion of the country’s entire employee base – around 0.03%. As we drill down further into the numbers, we also see that much of the job losses are concentrated in key industries that have been underperforming for the past year or so. These mainly include sectors in the goods-producing portion of the job market such as manufacturing and construction, which lost a combined 55,000 jobs – more than the total job losses for the entire labor market in July.

In contrast, service-providing positions were ultimately flat for the month, down by only 5,000 jobs in total. The most notable job increases in this sector came from the healthcare industry which added 33,000 positions in July alone.