America's employers pulled back on hiring but still delivered another month of solid gains in June, adding 209,000 jobs, a sign that the economy's resilience is confounding the Federal Reserve's drive to slow growth and inflation.

The latest evidence of economic strength makes it all but certain that the Fed will resume its interest rate hikes later this month after having ended a streak of 10 rate increases intended to slow inflation.

The June hiring figure reported by the government Friday is below the levels recorded in recent months. But it still points to a durable labor market that also features a historically high number of advertised openings. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6% from 3.7%, and is near a five-decade low.

"This is a good jobs report," acting Labor Secretary Julie Su told Spectrum News on Friday. "It is representative of stable steady growth, which is what we want in the economy. It is core to President [Joe] Biden's vision of how we not just recover from the pandemic and all the economic catastrophe that's attached to that, but create a strong, stable, resilient economy."

"This combined with a 3.6% unemployment rate that many people predicted that it would not go below 4% for several years," Su continued. "The president's policies have defied that, and now we've seen the 17th straight month of less than 4% unemployment, I think all of those things taken together is something that ... we are on the right track."

The economy is beset by high interest rates, elevated inflation and nagging worries about a possible recession resulting from the Fed's ever-higher interest rates. Yet many industries are still adding jobs to keep up with consumer demand and restore their workforces to pre-pandemic levels.

The solid pace of hiring and rising wages have enabled consumers to keep spending on services, from traveling to dining out to attending entertainment events. While economists have repeatedly forecast a recession for later this year or next year, a downturn is unlikely as long as companies keep steadily filling jobs.

Chair Jerome Powell has said that worker demand for higher pay to keep up with inflation can perpetuate inflation if employers pass on their higher costs to their customers. The Fed wants to see hiring and wage increases slow before halting its rate hikes.

The Fed has jacked up its key interest rate by a sizable 5 percentage points — the fastest pace of rate hikes in four decades. Those increases have made mortgages, auto loans and other forms of borrowing significantly more expensive.

Some Fed officials have said they are looking for signs of what they describe as better balance in the job market, by which they mean the supply and demand for workers would become more equal. After the economy emerged from the pandemic, the number of available jobs surged above 10 million — the highest level on record.

Su said that while she would not comment on Fed policy, she noted that "people have been saying that we're headed for recession for a very long time" and Biden's policies have defied expectations.

"The president's economic policies and the investments that have been made, the partnership between him and Congress that have resulted in some $2 trillion in investments in America, those have defied expectations for some time now," she said. "And we are seeing ... since he came into office, recovery in ways that were not expected. Another one is labor force participation rate, many people said it would take a long time for people to come back into the labor market. That has also not been true."

In a written statement, President Biden said of the report, "This is Bidenomics in action," referring to the term he's branded his economic agenda of fosuing on the middle class. 

"Our economy added more than 200,000 jobs last month — for a total of 13.2 million jobs since I took office," Biden said. "That’s more jobs added in two and a half years than any president has ever created in a four-year term. The unemployment rate has now remained below 4 percent for 17 months in a row — the longest stretch since the 1960s. The share of working-age Americans who have jobs is at the highest level in over 20 years. Inflation has come down by more than half. We are seeing stable and steady growth. That’s Bidenomics—growing the economy by creating jobs, lowering costs for hardworking families, and making smart investments in America."

Su said that the jobs report is evidence that what the administration dubs the "Bidenomics" plan — domestic investments in manufacturing, infrastructure and industries like semiconductors and clean energy, investments in domestic workers, lowering costs for American families and increasing competitions — is working.

"What we are seeing is also a broad-based recovery, which is something that is really important as well, right? That we have the idea of building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out means that we leave nobody behind," she said. "We invest in the middle-class, we make sure people who have been left out before are actually included, and we are seeing that the unemployment rate for different communities, that gap has continued to close too."

"We're staying vigilant, we're staying hopeful, and we've got to keep doing our job," she added.

The burgeoning demand for labor coincided with millions of Americans dropping out of the workforce to retire, avoid COVID, care for relatives or prepare for new careers. With companies struggling to fill openings, many offered sharply higher pay and better benefits to attract or keep employees.

There has been some progress toward a better alignment of supply and demand: More people have started looking for work in recent months, and most of them have found jobs. As the supply of workers has improved, businesses have said they're seeing more people apply for open positions. The number of job openings dropped in May, a sign that demand for workers is gradually cooling, though it remains above pre-pandemic levels.

In a sign of a potential slowdown in the job market, fewer Americans are quitting their jobs to seek new positions. Quits had soared after the pandemic. Millions of Americans had sought more meaningful or better-paying jobs, stoking the pressure on companies to raise pay to keep their employees. In May, about 4 million Americans left their jobs, up from April's figure but below a peak of 4.5 million reached last year.

Still, other recent reports suggest that the economy has continued to expand and that demand for workers remains high. On Thursday, a survey of service providers — including banks, restaurants and shipping companies — found that the sector expanded at a healthy clip in June and that services companies accelerated their hiring compared with May.

Also on Thursday, the payroll provider ADP reported an explosive increase in hiring by private employers in June — 497,000 added jobs. ADP's hiring figures, though, often diverge from the government's official data.