Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart by Amanda Cox. Horizontal axis shows months. Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession. Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized with National Bureau of Economic Research’s official business cycle dates.

The United States added just 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs over all in May, the Labor Department reported Friday, after having added an average of 220,000 in each of the three prior months. The May jobs report showed the slowest private-sector hiring in a year.

After hopes had risen that the economy was picking up steam, hiring was lackluster across the board. The biggest gains were in professional and business services and in health care (which has been charging forward in good times and bad anyway). The losers were state and local governments, which have been struggling with budget issues. They are expected to continue shedding workers in months to come.

Even most of the winners, though, have a long way to go before returning to their prerecession levels.

The chart above shows economywide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

The unemployment rate — measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work — was relatively unchanged in May, at 9.1 percent compared to 9 percent in April.

There are now 13.9 million workers who are looking for work and cannot find it; the figure nearly doubles if you include workers who are part-time but want to be employed full-time, and workers who want to work but have stopped looking.

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