America’s unemployed are sending a message to companies
They’ll go back to work when they feel safe — and well paid
The anaemic September US employment report, with only 194,000 jobs added, illustrates the extent to which the recovery stalled as coronavirus cases surged last month, but it also signals something deeper: America’s unemployed are still struggling with childcare and health issues, and they are reluctant to return to jobs they see as unsafe or undercompensated.
For months, economists predicted a surge in hiring in
September as unemployment benefits expired for millions of workers and schools reopened across the country. Instead, last month marked the weakest hiring this year, and an alarming number of women had to stop working again to deal with unstable school and childcare situations.
Gender imbalance
The numbers are striking: 309,000 women over age 20 dropped out of the labour force in September, meaning they quit work or halted their job searches. In contrast, 182,000 men joined the labour force, Labour Department data showed.
The simplest explanation for the mediocre jobs gains in September
is the rapidly spreading delta variant of the coronavirus. It zapped a lot of momentum from the recovery as people became
more hesitant to eat out and travel. A mere 2,100 jobs were added in hotels and just 29,000 in restaurants.
The key takeaway from the jobs report is that this is an uneven and bumpy recovery. The reason the United States has roughly 11 million job openings and 7.7 million unemployed is more complex than many are willing to admit.
Deeper implications
The coronavirus continues to be a major factor in people’s hesitancy to return to work, but there is something deeper going on in 2021. Workers, especially low-wage workers, are revolting against years of poor pay and stressful conditions. It remains unclear how the Great Reassessment of work will play out going forward. For now, people are still hesitant to take the first jobs available to them, if they don’t believe they’re good jobs. And they are not reluctant to quit a situation they don’t like.
“The big news out of the jobs report was the delta variant slowed things down. That disproportionately hit lowerwage workers,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “But people are also thinking they can afford [to] wait for a better job — or a safe job — to come along.”
For those looking for silver linings in the report, the most obvious is that the US unemployment rate fell to 4.8 per cent in September — the lowest since the pandemic hit. It marks a stunning rebound in just a year and a half from April 2020.