In this Thursday, June 21, 2018 photo, Marina Rodriguez, of Sawgrass Mills Mall, talks with job applicants at a job fair hosted by Job News South Florida, in Sunrise, Fla. The Labor Department said Friday, July 6, that the unemployment rate rose to 4.0 percent from 3.8 percent as more people began looking for work and not all of them found it. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)U.S. employers kept up a brisk hiring pace in June by adding 213,000 jobs, a sign of confidence in the economy despite the start of a potentially punishing trade war with China.
The job growth wasn’t enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising from 3.8 percent to 4 percent, the government said Friday. But the rate rose for an encouraging reason: More people felt it was a good time to begin looking for a job, though not all of them immediately found one.
The growing optimism that people can find work suggested that the 9-year old U.S. economic expansion – the second-longest on record – has the momentum to keep chugging along. Yet its path ahead is uncertain. Just hours before the monthly jobs report was released, the Trump administration imposed taxes on $34 billion in Chinese imports, and Beijing hit back with tariffs on the same amount of U.S. goods.
“The tariffs jumble things about what we should expect to see in the next few months,” said Cathy Barrera, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, the online jobs marketplace.
Some companies will likely respond to the tariffs by putting their hiring plans on hold until the trade picture becomes clearer.