July jobs - More jobs, more people want to work, and more money being made by workers.

Another month, another decent US jobs report.

Key takeaways from July job report:

1) The economy is humming
2) Job growth is slowing, but solid (+187k jobs now vs. +399k avg. last yr)
3) Service sector is hiring (health, social)
4) Women have done so well they make up 49.9% of workers (!)
5) Wage growth +4.4% y/y is well… pic.twitter.com/jeG0GfdQPW

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) August 4, 2023

A couple of numbers that stand out to me in this report is that while job growth continues, it also continues to decelerate from the torrid pace of 2021. Which you would expect when we get below 4% unemployment, but it's also what the Federal Reserve bankers would want to see if they're still concerned about "overheating" and inflation.

Adding over 1 million private sector jobs in 6 months during a full-employment situation is still pretty good. And two sectors have been especially strong in recent reports. One is construction, which has added over 100,000 jobs in 2023 even as manufacturing hiring has flatlined in the wake of the Fed's interest rate hikes.

And another is health care, which added 64,000 jobs in July, has added over 300,000 jobs in 2023, and has added nearly 900,000 jobs since the end of 2021. This puts health care employment well above its pre-COVID levels.

And even better is that unemployment dropped in July for the "good reason" - more people continuing to enter the work force and finding jobs. In the last two months, the BLS says a total of 285,000 Americans have joined the work force (seasonally adjusted, the non-seasonal increase is 1.65 million), and a seasonally-adjusted 541,000 more Americans say they are working.

The rate of people entering the US work force is something we haven't seen in 23 years.

More than 3.1m workers joined the labor force in the past year. That’s a nearly 2% expansion of the labor force — something that has not occurred since the tech craze of July 1999 to July 2000 and was more common in the 1970s and 1980s. https://t.co/mmgJ8NWzHR pic.twitter.com/IsW0Tj88Of

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) August 4, 2023

The '70s and '80s were also the peak of Baby Boomers becoming working age and/or rejoining the work force after having kids. No such case in America of the 2020s, but it does seem that those Boomers that left the work force are being replaced, which is a very good sign for future growth potential.

So moderate job growth, favorable work force numbers, and good wage growth that's beating inflation? Seems like a good idea to try to keep the good times rolling for the rest of 2023.