Wall Street was slightly uneven in modest premarket trading Thursday ahead of pair of employment reports coming from the Labor Department.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were up less than 0.1% before the bell, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq were both down less than 0.1%.

Procter & Gamble shares were flat after the company announced in a regulatory filing that it expects to cut 7,000 nonmanufacturing jobs as part of a two-year restructuring plan. That's about 15% of the Cincinnati-based consumer packaged goods company's head count.

Later Thursday morning, the government offers of its latest jobless claims report, which is essentially a proxy for U.S. layoffs. While layoffs have remained in a healthy range the past few years, some minor cracks in the labor market have started to show.

A report from the payroll company ADP early this week estimated that U.S. employers outside of the government hired far fewer workers last month than economists expected. That could bode ill for Friday’s more comprehensive jobs report coming from the U.S. Labor Department, one of Wall Street’s most anticipated data releases each month.

Analysts expect the May jobs report to show that U.S. employers added 130,000 jobs last month, down from 177,000 in April.

So far, the U.S. job market has remained remarkably resilient despite years of high inflation and now the threat of President Donald Trump’s high tariffs. But weakness there could undermine the rest of the economy.

Traders in recent days have built up bets that the Federal Reserve will need to cut interest rates later this year in order to prop up the economy, which in turn caused a decline in Treasury yields. The weaker-than-expected ADP report also led Trump to urge Fed Chair Jerome Powell to deliver cuts to rates more quickly.

The Fed has yet to cut interest rates this year after slashing them through the end of 2024. Part of the reason for the pause is that the Fed wants to see how much Trump’s tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation. While lower interest rates could boost the economy, they also tend to give inflation more fuel.

In other equities trading, the teen discount retailer Five Below jumped 6.5% after it beat analysts' sales and profit target last quarter. The Philadelphia company also raised its full-year sales guidance and the low end of its earnings-per-share range.

PVH Corp., formerly known as Phillips-Van Heusen, tumbled nearly 8% in premarket after it slashed its full-year profit forecast. The owner of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein pointed to tariffs as the main reason for the slimmer outlook, the latest in a long list of other major U.S. companies to do so.

Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, France's CAC 40 and the German DAX each rose 0.3%. Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.2%.

In Asian trading, Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 shed 0.5% to finish at 37,554.49, while Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was little changed at 8,538.90.

In South Korea, the Kospi jumped 1.5% to 2,812.05 after the country's new president and leading liberal politician Lee Jae-myung began his term, vowing to restart talks with North Korea and beef up a trilateral partnership with the U.S. and Japan.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained 1.1% to 23,906.97, while the Shanghai Composite rose 0.21% to 3,384.10.

In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude gained 15 cents to $63 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, picked up 20 cents to $65.06 a barrel.

The U.S. dollar rose to 143.19 Japanese yen from 142.78 yen. The euro cost $1.1425, up from $1.1418.