US added 850K jobs in June as companies scrambled to staff up

The US added 850,000 jobs last month as Americans continued to emerge from the pandemic and businesses scrambled to hire new workers, the feds said Friday.

June’s numbers topped economists’ expectations of 706,000 jobs added, and come after the country added 559,000 jobs in May. The unemployment rate unexpectedly ticked up to 5.9 percent in June from 5.8 percent in the month prior, according to Friday’s much-anticipated jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s far higher than the 50-year low of 3.5 percent reported in February of last year, before the pandemic gutted the economy.