ADP Employment Report

Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 8:15 A.M. ET

Nonfarm private employment decreased 79,000 from May to June 2008 on a seasonally
adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated
change in employment from April to May was revised down from an increase of 40,000
to an increase of 25,000.
This month’s decrease in employment was broad based across industrial sectors and
suggests continued weakness in employment.

Employment in the service-providing sector of the economy declined 3,000, the first decline since November 2002. Employment in the goods-producing sector declined 76,000, with manufacturing employment falling 44,000, marking their nineteenth and twenty-second consecutive monthly declines, respectively. Large businesses, defined as those with 500 or more workers, saw employment decline 51,000, while medium-size companies with between 50 and 499 workers declined by 35,000. Employment among small-size businesses, defined as those with fewer than 50 workers, advanced just 7,000 during the month.

Two sectors of the economy hit hardest by recent problems in mortgage markets have been residential construction and financial activities related to home sales and mortgage lending. Today’s report suggests no lessening of the recent strain on employment in these industries. In June, construction employment dropped 34,000. This was the nineteenth consecutive monthly decline, and brings the total decline in construction jobs since the peak in August of 2006 to 349,000. In addition, employment in financial activities declined 3,000 during the month.

The ADP National Employment Report® is a measure of nonfarm private employment, based on a subset of aggregated and anonymous payroll data that represents approximately 392,000 of ADP's 500,000 U.S. business clients and roughly 24 million employees working in all 19 of the major North American Industrial Classification (NAICS) private industrial sectors. The ADP National Employment Report was developed to help meet the need for additional timely and accurate estimates of short-term movements in the national labor market among economists, financial professionals, and government policy-makers. Because ADP pays 1-in-6 private sector employees in the United States every pay period across a broad range of industries, firm sizes, and geographies, it has a unique and significant perspective on the U.S. labor market.