But others, including Wall Street, looked at it differently. Since January, the pace of payroll cuts had moderated through May, when employment fell by a revised 322,000.
Analysts had expected the economy to lose about 350,000 jobs in June.
The renewed acceleration in job losses contrasted with a batch of recent economic reports that signaled improvements in various parts of the economy, including housing and manufacturing. A separate government report , for instance, showed that factory orders in May increased by the largest amount in nearly a year.
Unemployment is always a lagging indicator and many economists still expect the economy to start growing again later this year. But the latest jobs report offers evidence that the labor market could remain sluggish for months or years to come.
The unemployment rate for men reached 10 percent. The jobless figure for women was 7.6 percent.
The figures would have been higher were it not for a drop in the number of people participating in the job market, including discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force because they don't think they can find jobs.
Of particular concern, the number of long-term unemployed - those out of work for 27 weeks or more - swelled by 433,000 last month to 4.4 million, the report said. This group now represents 29 percent of unemployed workers.
"This is going to be a bigger and bigger social problem going into next year," said David Card, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Employers in every major sector ratcheted up the job cuts last month, with the exception of health and education services, which added 34,000 jobs over the month.
Manufacturing employment continued to sink, dropping another 136,000 positions, as the battered auto industry and related transportation industry contracted. The construction industry cut 79,000 jobs last month and is now down 1 million jobs from a year ago, masking job gains from some 2,000 projects in the Obama Recovery Act that already have been launched.
Professional and business services eliminated 118,000 positions last month, retail trade gave up 21,000 jobs, and even government, which had been one of the bright spots in this recession, thinned its rolls by 52,000.
That was partly due to an end of temporary work at the Census Bureau, but with many states, notably California, grappling with a severe budget crisis, the government is no longer a haven.
