The U.S. Labor Department released its June 2014 Employment report on Thursday showing the latest job gains and losses and reporting 288,000 jobs were added in June.

A separate report showed the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, down 2 percent from last month. The number of unemployed persons decreased by 325,000 to 9.5 million. The Hispanic unemployment rate remained steady at 7.8 percent.

"It's is the fifth consecutive month with job growth of at least 200,000, and this is the most total jobs added in the first half of a year since 1999." U.S. say U.S. Secretary of Labor, Thomas E. Perez, in a statement. He added, "Businesses created 262,000 more jobs in June, bringing us to a total of 9.7 million new private-sector jobs over the last 52 months (the longest such streak on record). The unemployment rate dropped to 6.1 percent (down significantly from 7.5 percent a year ago)."

The reports were a day early because of the federal July 4th holiday on Friday.

In an analysis of the job and unemployment figures, Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research said, "The news is also positive in the household survey with the unemployment rate falling to 6.1 percent, a new low for the recovery. This was due to people entering the labor force and finding jobs; the employment-to-population ratio rose to 59.0 percent. This is a new high for the recovery, but still 4.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level."

Jobless claims rose by 2,000 to 315,000 with the highest insured unemployment rates in Puerto Rico (3.9) Alaska (3.8) and New Jersey (2.9) and California (2.8.) according to the U.S. Department of Labor's weekly claims report. Where they also showed the largest increase in claims for the week ending June 21 were in New Jersey (+3,235), Connecticut (+1,864), Maryland (+1,624), and New York (+1,430).

CEPR's Baker said the job gains were biggest in retail with 40,200 job, with professional and technical services adding 30,100 jobs and government sector jobs adding 26,000 almost all at the local level. Average hourly wages he pointed out have risen to 2.3 percent over the last year, sometimes rising more rapidly than wages of supervisory workers.

Baker said, "While this might seem to conflict with recent reports showing the gap in wages between college educated and non-educated workers hitting new highs, these two new developments are easily reconciled when we recognize that college-educated workers are increasingly working at jobs that don't require a college degree. A larger share of college-educated workers is now showing up in the production workers group, crowding out workers with less education."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Employment Situation Summary said unemployment rates for adult women (5.3) and blacks (10.7) declined in June and the rate increased for teenagers (21.0). Rates for adult men (5.7 percent), whites (5.3 percent) and Latinos (7.8) showed little change.

Economist columnist, Peter Morici argued, however, in advance of Thursday's figures and statistics, that the while the jobless rate might be down to 6.3 percent, most of the reduction comes from adults quitting the labor market, and 26 million American working part-time. Adding those figures together, the unemployment figure is more than 12 percent.

He also said, "Baby boomer retirements are not appreciably driving down the adult employment rate — Americans between the ages of 65-69 working has risen 23 to 32 percent since 2000. It's prime working age Americans that are not showing up — for example 1 in 6 adults males between ages 25 and 64 is not working."

Morici also said, "In this century, GDP growth has averaged 1.7 per year, whereas during the Reagan-Clinton period it was 3 to 4 percent." And he adds, "In an economy with 9.8 million unemployed and actively looking for work, too many lack skills appropriate to the 21st Century economy and seem to lack adequate incentives to acquire those."

An AP report on job recovery, however, found that many states hadn't regained all the jobs lost since the beginning of Great Recession, with 32 states still having fewer jobs than when the recession began in December 2007. Illinois is down 184,000, New Jersey down 147,000 and Florida down 170,000. There were gains, however, in Texas, with the energy boom adding more than 1 million jobs since December 2007, and Washington, DC, saw gains of 7 percent.