The sluggish U.S. labor market added just 80,000 new jobs in June, as the country's jobless rate stayed at 8.2 percent.

Some economists had projected that the American jobs market might regain more strength, but the number of new jobs was only marginally higher than the anemic 69,000 figure recorded in May.

The closely watched monthly jobs and unemployment report has become a barometer for the state of the world's largest economy and is playing a key role in the U.S. presidential election.

No president since World War Two has won re-election with a jobless rate above 7.4 percent. Economists say the U.S. economy is unlikely to come close to matching that figure in the next four months before the November election.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney, in a daily campaign broadside, has derided U.S. President Barack Obama as failing to bring the American economy back from the depths of the nation's biggest freefall since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Mr. Obama has countered that the recovery is not as fast as he would like, but that his policies are working and have added several million jobs during his White House tenure.

Still, more than 12 million U.S. workers remain jobless and the unemployment rate has been higher every month than the 7.8 percent figure when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009. Even with the added jobs in the last three years, the U.S. is still several million jobs short of matching the 2008 total before the onslaught of the global recession.

The U.S. economy has also been buffeted by the stagnant economic fortunes of Europe's 17-nation euro currency bloc, one of its largest trading partners, and the slowing economy in China, the second largest economy in the world.