Employers in New York increased their staffs by 29,400 workers, while those in Texas added 29,300, figures from the Labor Department showed Friday. Joblessness increased by 0.4 percentage point in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and South Carolina. Nevada continued to lead the nation in unemployment with a rate of 12.9 percent.
Widespread job growth is needed to shore up incomes after spending among consumers ground to a halt in the second quarter. That raised concern that the world’s largest economy was stalling. A Labor Department report on Aug. 5 showed employers added 117,000 workers to payrolls last month and the jobless rate fell to 9.1 percent.
“The overall labor market was doing better than previous months, but the bigger point is that it’s a lot weaker than earlier in the year,” Paul Dales, senior United States economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said before the report. “That’s a concern given that any data from July won’t reflect the market turmoil in the last couple of weeks that really could have prompted some businesses to postpone or cancel any hiring plans.”
After Nevada, the jobless rate was highest in California at 12 percent, and Michigan and South Carolina, both at 10.9 percent.
Payrolls in Michigan rose 23,000 and Tennessee gained by 14,300. They rounded out the top four states showing the biggest increase.
The biggest job losses last month occurred in Illinois, where employers cut payrolls by 24,900, and in Florida, which had a 22,100 decrease.
Over the last 12 months, six states lost jobs, including Indiana, Nevada, Kansas, Alabama, Georgia and Delaware.
The jobless rate in North Dakota, the lowest in the United States, increased to 3.3 percent from 3.2 percent in June.
While payroll growth picked up in July, employment prospects for Americans have dimmed compared with earlier in the year. Employers added 216,000 workers from May to July, compared with 646,000 in the previous three-month period.
The risk of a recession has risen to 30 percent from 14 percent in July, according to the median of the 39 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. A sell-off in stocks, government fiscal austerity and a lack of jobs will hurt American growth, which slowed to a 0.9 percent pace in the first half of 2011, the economists said.
State and local employment data are derived independently from the national statistics, which are typically released on the first Friday of every month. The state figures are subject to larger sampling errors because they come from smaller surveys, making the national figures more reliable, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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