... and private payrolls jumped 93,000 the month before, and gained 117,000 in July.
So what's to explain the net negative that's being widely reported: government employment dropped off by a larger number, with the greatest shortfall in local government hiring & layoffs.
The graphic is built from Bureau of Labor Statistics reported numbers, in thousands (000), for the private sector.
State & local budgets are completely crunched, and to make it worse, some Republican governors have been slow-walking the federal aide that's been made available to their states.
Chris Cristie of NJ, for example, held back until the very last day of a 30-day application period to apply for the Education Jobs Fund.
The governor drew criticism for waiting to apply until the day before the deadline, most sharply from the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s dominant teachers union, with whom he has been feuding.
"There was never any question that New Jersey was going to get this money," NJEA spokesman Steve Baker said. "We could have had the money in mid-August and could have already put people back to work if the governor hadn’t dragged his feet."
Compare that to neighboring Pennsylania, where Rendell got the money to the local school budgets before the school year began, and teachers could be rehired for classes.
Republican politicians are working to make sure jobs don't pick up before November, no matter how much pain and duress that creates. The drop in local government jobs swamped the steady gains in hiring by firms, so the unemployment rate remains stuck.
Note from the chart - payroll jobs in the private sector were plunging in every single month of 2008, the last year of G.W. Bush, by several hundred thousand and kept hemorrhaging in the first half of 2009. The turnaround is undeniable. As is the risk of returning to the financial and corporate hiring abyss.
This is what the coming election, even the upcoming early voting October period, is about for all Americans. Forward or back. That simple.