US adds 916,000 jobs amid vaccine progress

March unemployment fell to 6% from 6.2% in Feb.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs in March, as coronavirus vaccine distribution improved, Congress approved a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, and states across the country lifted restrictions on businesses.

The unemployment rate edged down to 6% last month from 6.2% in February, according to the monthly report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The surge in hiring comes one year after the pandemic threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin, sending a signal that the recovery may have reached a turning point. It followed several sluggish months in the labor market as coronavirus cases surged and many employers paused rehiring amid concerns about efforts to control the pandemic.

Economists hailed the report as a welcome sign that the country may finally be climbing out of the steep hole of jobs lost during the last year, now at a fast enough rate to see a full recovery by some point next year.

“This is a wonderful report. Hopefully we have many more months like it ahead,” said Nick Bunker, the economic research director at Indeed, a jobs-listing service. “It’s fantastic to see the big bounce back in job gains.” At this rate, the labor market could see a full recovery by the middle of 2022, Bunker said.

The labor market lost 22 million jobs in March and April 2020. It recovered 12 million of those jobs over the next six months, but then the pace of rehiring slowed drastically as the virus began a Fall and Winter spike. The new March data was the largest number of jobs added since August and the thirdstraight month of growth. The survey was taken the week of March 12th, the same week that the stimulus package passed by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate was signed into law by President Joe Biden.

It could offer clues about the trajectory of the labor market in 2021.

Women, for example, who had left the workforce in droves earlier in the pandemic, are returning to the workforce in large numbers as schools have reopened in-person learning.

But the country is far from in the clear.

Long-term unemployment, those out of work for more than six months, remains a vexing problem as many job-seekers who lost their job early in the pandemic are still out of work a year later. Studies have shown that people out of the labor market for more than six months often have a harder time landing new jobs, a trend that has proven very difficult to address in past recessions. And the personal toll grows too, as time out of work sprawls.

The number of people who have been unemployed for more than six months remains at 4.2 million — up by more than 3.1 million from before the pandemic. A whopping 43% of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, the BLS said.

Carter Young, 67, has been out of work since March, after being furloughed, then laid off from his job as a clerk at a resort near Sedona, Arizona. Young said he wishes he could retire, but needs the money to support his family. Even though he’s vaccinated, Young said he is still a hesitant to work in another job in retail where he’d have to interact face to face with people, until the virus is brought more under control. “It’s sort of a catch 22,” he said. “Things are opening up, and we’ll see what happens in the state of Arizona. I’m a little nervous to going out to work with the public.”

And the threat of the coronavirus cases rising again also hangs over the economy, said Drew Matus, chief market strategist for MetLife Investment Management. Many of the jobs added in March were driven by companies reopening as pandemic restrictions were lifted, he said.

“People are concerned that some states are reopening too soon,” he said. “If states hadn’t reopened you probably wouldn’t have this number. So we’ll see what that means for covid later. It did provide a boost.”

In March, 492,000 women reentered the workforce as schools reopened for inperson learning, while 144,000 men left it, bringing the number of men and women who have left the workforce into roughly equal proportions, according to Labor Department data. It reverses the trend from last year, as more women than men left the workforce as the school year began in September.

In addition to women leaving leave their jobs because of schooling and child-care issues, many women were driven out of the workforce because of the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on female-dominated industries.