Employment in construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade, transportation and warehousing, temporary help services and government showed little or no change in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Overall, total nonfarm payroll employment grew 151,000 in August, and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9 percent.
Employment in mining continued to trend down in August (-4,000). Since reaching a peak in September 2014, mining has lost 223,000 jobs.
The number of persons unemployed less than five weeks w in August. At 2 million, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was unchanged in August and accounted for 26.1 percent of the unemployed.
In August, 1.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.