No World Cup jobs bump evident in June data

Hosting the World Cup was supposed to mean a tourism-driven hiring boom. But yesterday's June jobs report delivered the opposite: leisure and hospitality shed sixty-one thousand jobs — that's restaurants, hotels, the sectors most exposed to tourism. The surprise deepens when you look closer: May's hiring surge, initially reported at seventy thousand, was revised down to just forty thousand. Over the past three months, the sector has actually lost an average of nine thousand jobs monthly, a sharp reversal from the thirteen thousand monthly gains in the prior year. According to Axios, the expected World Cup hiring bump either never materialized or was overwhelmed by losses elsewhere. The full story may emerge later this month when local employment figures are released — worth watching in World Cup host cities' retail sales and tax receipts.

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