'Devastating' New Jobs Report Shows Labor Market 'Cracking' Under Trump

A federal jobs report released on Friday showed the US economy added a mere 22,000 jobs in August in yet another signal of weakness in the US labor market.

Economists had projected the economy would produce 75,000 jobs on the month, which means that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers released on Friday were well below the consensus estimate.

What's more, the total number of jobs created in July and June were once again revised downward, and the economy as a whole has added an average of fewer than 30,000 jobs over the last three months.

Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put the bad jobs report in stark terms.

"The labor market is going from frozen to cracking," she said, and then pointed to net job losses in industries including mining, construction, and manufacturing that show significant stress in the blue-collar economy. In fact, the majority of job growth came from the healthcare industry over the last month.