Breaking protocol

Roughly an hour before the employment data was released, President Donald Trump appeared to hint on Twitter that a strong jobs report was coming. “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning,” he tweeted.

The president is normally briefed on the monthly jobs report the day before it is released, and he and other administration officials are not supposed to comment on it beforehand.

Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, downplayed Trump’s tweet.

“He didn’t give any numbers,” Kudlow said. “No one revealed the numbers to the public.”

of the late 1990s.

Businesses desperate to hire are reaching deep into pools of the unemployed to find workers. Unemployment among high school graduates fell sharply to 3.9 percent, a 17year low. For black Americans, it hit a record low of 5.9 percent. The unemployment rate for women dropped to 3.6 percent, the lowest since 1953.

And the number of part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs is down 6 percent from a year ago. That means businesses are converting some part-timers to full-time work.

Companies are also hiring the long-term unemployed — those who have been out of work for six months or longer. That’s important because economists worry that people who are out of work for long periods can see their skills erode.

Those trends suggest that companies, for all their complaints, are still able to hire without significantly boosting wages. Average hourly pay rose 2.7 percent in May from a year earlier, below the 3.5 percent to 4 percent pace that occurred the last time unemployment was this low.