WASHINGTON, June 3 (Xinhua) -- Private companies in the United States added 978,000 jobs in May, posting the biggest gain in 11 months and indicating continued labor market recovery, payroll data company Automatic Data Processing (ADP) reported Thursday.
"Private payrolls showed a marked improvement from recent months and the strongest gain since the early days of the recovery," said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP. Private companies added a revised 654,000 jobs in April.
The service-providing sectors added 850,000 jobs in May, according to the report, which was produced by the ADP Research Institute in collaboration with Moody's Analytics.
The leisure and hospitality sectors added 440,000 jobs, the education and health services sectors added 139,000, while the trade, transportation and utilities sectors added 118,000. The information sector, however, lost 3,000 jobs in the month.
"While goods producers grew at a steady pace, it is service providers that accounted for the lion's share of the gains, far outpacing the monthly average in the last six months," Richardson said.
Large firms and medium-sized businesses hired 308,000 and 338,000 workers, respectively, and small companies added 333,000 employees, the ADP report showed, indicating a balanced recovery across different company sizes.
Private companies in the United States slashed roughly 20 million jobs in March and April last year due to COVID-19 shutdowns. Amid reopening efforts, the private sector saw a revised job gain of over 3 million in May, followed by a revised growth of over 4 million in June.
After that, however, job growth has been slowing down. In December, the trend was even reversed, with private companies shedding a revised 75,000 jobs amid COVID-19 spikes.
The ADP report came one day before the crucial monthly employment report released by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will include employment data from both the private sector and the government. Enditem
