Hiring stays slow in June

Third straight month of weak job gains reflects struggling economy.

WASHINGTON — A third straight month of weak hiring shows the U.S. economy is still struggling three years after the recession officially ended.

U.S. employers added just 80,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

For the April-June quarter, the economy added an average of 75,000 jobs a month — one-third the pace in the first quarter.

And for the first six months of 2012, employers added an average of 150,000 jobs a month. That’s fewer than the 161,000 average for the first half of 2011.

Economists are expecting tepid job growth for the rest of the year, too.

As an employer, the government isn’t helping.

The number of jobs at all levels of government fell 4,000 in June.

Only local governments added jobs — and it was a scant 4,000. State governments cut 1,000 jobs. They shed 13,000 in the April-June quarter.

The federal government cut 7,000 jobs in June. It hasn’t added jobs since March 2011.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, seized on the disappointing jobs report to instead attack President Barack Obama’s economic track record.

“This is a time for Americans to choose whether they want more of the same,” Romney said from Wolfeboro, N.H., where he is vacationing. “It doesn’t have to be this way. America can do better. And this kick in the gut has to end.”

Obama, speaking to a sympathetic crowd Friday in a school gymnasium in Poland, Ohio, took a longer view than the monthly report or even the election season.

“I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get into the middle class have some basic security,” he said. “We’ve got to deal with what’s been happening over the last decade, the last 15 years.”

Among the few industries with decent job growth was temporary help services, which suggests that employers are not confident enough in the sustainability of the recovery to invest in permanent hires even if their order books are growing.