The Burea of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report this morning, and stronger labor-force participation meant that moderate payroll growth didn’t push the unemployment rate down — that metric actually rose.

Most commentators have agreed this is a “status quo” jobs report, on pace with the moderate but uninspiring recovery we’ve been seeing. That has one obvious and important implication – combined with the fact that unemployment actually ticked up, this should slightly tamp down talk of the Federal Reserve’s tightening monetary policy in the next six months or so. While the labor market is improving, it’s doing so at a slow rate, and if the Fed follows the rule it’s set for itself, we won’t see an employment picture that allows (or mandates) tightening for a while.

Payroll growth was on pace for the long term, rising 175,000 versus a rate of 172,000 over the last twelve months, while the labor-force-participation rate rose from 63.3 percent to 63.4. But the pace over the last three months — 155,000 jobs per month from March to May — has been noticeably slower than the pace from November to February — 233,000 jobs a month.

Private payrolls rose by 178,000 jobs, while government jobs — federal, state, and local — shrunk by 3,000. Interestingly, federal government payrolls continued to shrink slowly, even excluding the ailing Postal Service, dropping by 9,400, while local government austerity has cotinued to ease, with local payrolls rising by 13,000.

There was essentially no wage growth this past month, weakinging what’s otherwise an okay report — the average workweek was unchanged at 34.5 hours, while hourly earnings was statistically unchanged, rising 1 cent (to $23.89).