Print edition: 
SAN FRANCISCO — Small businesses in the U.S. saw net employment gains in August, but their hiring pace slowed from earlier this year, and small-business owners' outlook for the economy worsened significantly from July to August, according to two surveys released Monday.
Small-business employment grew a seasonally adjusted 0.1 percent in August, adding about 26,000 new jobs to the economy, according to the Intuit Small-Business Employment Index, a study of 57,000 small businesses nationwide that use Intuit Online Payroll. The firms studied have 20 or fewer employees.
From January through April, small companies were hiring at a seasonally adjusted rate that hovered in the 0.2 percent range, translating into 42,000 new jobs in January, 50,000 in February, 49,000 in March and 42,000 in April, according to Intuit.
But small firms' employment rate dropped to 0.16 percent in May, for a gain of 34,000 jobs that month, 0.14 percent in June (32,000 jobs), and 0.12 percent in July and August (26,000 jobs each). Since the growth trend started in October 2009, the small firms studied have added a total of 340,000 jobs, Intuit said.
"As with other economic indicators, these small-business figures show signs that the recovery is not progressing as fast as we would like," said Susan Woodward, an economist who worked with Intuit to create its index, in a news release. "In most years, August is a month of unambiguous employment growth, but not this year."
Still, Woodward said, salaries and wages didn't drop — they were essentially flat in August, as were the number of hours worked, according to the Intuit data.
Meanwhile, a separate survey found that small-business owners' outlook on the economy soured significantly in August, with 62 percent of owners saying the economy is getting worse, up from 57 percent who said that last month. Another 24 percent said the economy is getting better, according to the latest Discover Small Business Watch, a survey of 750 businesses with five or fewer employees.
A record 55 percent of those surveyed said they expect unfavorable economic conditions for their business over the next six months, up from 45 percent who said that in July. Another 20 percent said they expect conditions to stay the same, and 21 percent said they expect things to get better over the next six months. Discover's index measuring small-business owners' confidence in the overall economy dropped to 73 in August, from 83 in July, the third straight monthly decline and the lowest it's been in about 1 1/2 years. The survey has been conducted monthly since August 2006.
