Private employers in the US added 150,000 jobs last month, ADP said Wednesday.

That was fewer than consensus expected. So, a “miss.” Relative to the collective wisdom of people who’re almost never right. As a helpful reminder: Data doesn’t “miss.” Data’s just data. Economists “miss.” We have this backwards.

I digress. June’s headline took the three-month moving average down to 165,000. That’s the slowest three-month average pace since February.

As the figure shows, job growth’s decelerating. But it’s still running ahead of last fall’s pace.

ADP chief economist Nela Richardson called the results uneven. “Job growth has been solid, but not broad-based,” she said Wednesday. “Had it not been for a rebound in hiring in leisure and hospitality, June would have been a downbeat month.”

That’ll elicit emphatic nods from some readers. A lot of open jobs in America are for positions that folks with college degrees and advanced skill sets simply don’t want.

That said, I’m not sure the breakdown backs up Richardson’s assessment. Leisure and hospitality did account for an outsized share of June’s job gains, at 63,000. But construction added 27,000 jobs, trade 15,000, professional services 25,000, finance 11,000, “other” services 16,000 and education 9,000. Only manufacturing, mining and IT shed jobs last month.

If you look at the breakdown by firm size, only one bucket (the 20-49 employees cohort) saw a net job loss, and there only 8,000.

So, again, Richardson’s color doesn’t appear to line up especially well with June’s results. But generally speaking, it’s probably accurate to say that quite a bit of the hiring taking place in the US services sector right now is for jobs “nobody” actually wants.

Anyway, who cares, right? Job seekers, surely. But not traders. And not policymakers. Not beyond today. By Friday afternoon, this data will be rendered entirely irrelevant for the purposes of markets and the Fed. All that matters is NFP. Even if it’s a hopelessly extrapolated data set muddied by an opaque seasonal adjustment methodology and a low response rate.

For what it’s worth, YoY pay growth for so-called “job-stayers” on ADP’s “Pay Insights” series slipped below 5% in June. That’s the first four-handle reading since July of 2021.

Pay growth for “switchers” was 7.7%. The gap between the two (conceptually the reward for quitting) was unchanged at 2.8ppt.

The update came on the heels of a JOLTS release which suggested US job openings unexpectedly rose in May.

Meanwhile, jobless claims, released a day early to dodge July 4, showed initial filers were 238,000 in the week to June 29. That was more than expected.

The four-week moving average is now 238,500.

As discussed at some length here last week, claims have now moved definitively higher. We’re not going back to the lows. If initial claims move up closer to 300,000, it’ll be time to fret.

Continuing claims in the week to June 22 were 1.86 million, an upside surprise. It was the ninth consecutive weekly increase.