U.S. gains 513,000 jobs in month; most are census temps

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's employers likely unleashed a wave of hiring last month, but it probably won't be repeated.

Most of the jobs expected to have been generated in May were for census workers hired on a temporary basis by the federal government. Such hiring is expected to have peaked in May and then begin tailing off in June.

By contrast, hiring by private employers—the backbone of the economy—may have slowed down a bit in May.

All told, the Labor Department's new employment snapshot released Friday morning is likely to be seen as further evidence that the job market is healing. Yet it's still years away from normal health and from recouping the millions of jobs wiped out by the recent recession.

Employers eliminated 7.8 million jobs from the start of the recession in December 2007 through April. To fill that hole and keep up with a growing work force, the economy would need to create a net 14.3 million jobs, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. He doesn't see that happening until early 2015.

"The gap is likely to close only gradually," said Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The United States probably added a net total of 513,000 jobs last month, economists predict. That would be an improvement from the 290,000 jobs added in April, the most in four years. And May's figure would mark the biggest monthly gain in payrolls since more than 1 million jobs were generated in September 1983, when the country was recovering from a severe recession.

But a huge chunk of May's net job gains—perhaps 300,000 to 400,000—could come from the government's hiring of temporary census workers.