The headline number out of the New York State Department of Labor's Long Island report is unremarkable. Private sector employment across Nassau and Suffolk rose by 3,600 jobs over the year, up 0.3 percent, to 1,204,600 in June.

The number underneath it is the story.

Of the nine private industry sectors the state tracks here, exactly two added jobs compared with a year earlier. Private education and health services added 10,100. Professional and business services added 600. Government, counted separately, lost 500.

Do that arithmetic and something uncomfortable falls out of it. Two sectors contributed roughly 10,700 jobs. The region as a whole netted 3,600. Whatever happened across the rest of Long Island's private economy over those twelve months, it subtracted something on the order of 7,000 jobs from the total.

A one-industry expansion

This is not a Long Island quirk. Health care has been the load-bearing wall of employment growth across most of the Northeast for years. But the concentration here is worth naming plainly, because a region whose job growth arrives almost entirely through hospitals, medical practices, home health, nursing facilities and schools is a region with a particular set of dependencies.

Those jobs are close to recession-proof, which is genuinely good news for a place with Long Island's cost of living. They are also, in large part, funded through insurance reimbursement, Medicaid and Medicare, and public education budgets. That is a different kind of exposure than a diversified private economy carries, and it is not the kind that shows up in a monthly jobs release.

For comparison, the state and the nation each grew private employment 0.5 percent over the same period. Long Island grew 0.3. The Island is not shrinking. It is expanding more slowly than the country around it, and doing so on a narrower base.

The month-to-month picture, and one real oddity

Seasonal hiring makes June a busy month by definition, so the more informative comparison is against a typical June rather than against May.

Long Island's private sector added 11,000 jobs between May and June, not seasonally adjusted. The average gain for that stretch is 15,700. The region hired, but it hired well below its own normal pace.

The construction line is the one that stands out. Construction lost 800 jobs in June, in a month when it typically adds 1,300. That is a swing of more than 2,000 against the seasonal norm, and in a single month it would be easy to read as a warning.

Except that the spring says the opposite. Between March and May, Long Island construction firms added 8,700 jobs, well above the typical spring gain of 6,400. Read the two together and the likeliest explanation is timing rather than trouble: the sector front-loaded its hiring, got its crews on site early, and had nothing left to add by June.

Leisure and hospitality, meanwhile, did what a summer on Long Island asks of it, adding 10,100 jobs against an average gain of 8,000. The beaches, the restaurants and the East End season are still one of the largest employers the region has, even if those jobs are seasonal by construction and mostly disappear again by November.

What it means if you run something here

A 0.3 percent growth rate is not a crisis and it is not a boom. It is a flat market, and flat markets reward different behavior than growing ones.

If you are hiring outside health care and education, you are competing in a labor pool that is not expanding, against employers who can absorb wage pressure through reimbursement rates you do not have. If you sell to Long Island businesses, your customers' payrolls are, in aggregate, roughly where they were a year ago. And if you are in construction, the spring numbers suggest the work is still there; the calendar around it has simply moved.

The Long Island figures are compiled by the state Labor Department's Division of Research and Statistics, which keeps its regional office on West Old Country Road in Hicksville. The data is public, it is updated monthly, and it is the cheapest market research anyone doing business on this island will ever get.