We’re getting back to work
Latest report finds curtain closing on labor crunch
Solid hiring, strong wage gains and sharp price increases are drawing more Americans into the workforce. The trend, if sustained, would mean some long-awaited relief for businesses that have been desperate to fill jobs.
The number of people either working or looking for work still hasn’t fully recovered from the mass layoffs that followed the eruption of COVID-19. But Friday’s jobs report showed that it is clearly heading in that direction.
Here are five top takeaways from the jobs report:
LABOR SHORTAGES EASING
After the pandemic hammered the U.S. economy in the spring of 2020, pushing 22 million people out of work, many Americans seemed reluctant to return to low-paying jobs at restaurants, hotels and other services businesses, particularly while COVID still raged. Employers posted millions of jobs that went unfilled.
Now, though, with wages rising at their fastest pace in decades and COVID fading steadily, Americans are flooding back into the workforce at the fastest pace in 20 years.
This can be seen most clearly among so-called prime age workers, ages 25 through 54, whom economists follow because they mostly exclude students and people who are likely to be retired.
WOMEN SURGE BACK
With schools reopened and child care centers recovering, women have also accelerated their return to the workforce. During the pandemic, women — particularly mothers — were more likely to either lose jobs or quit and drop out of the workforce altogether.
HIGH PAY
With consumers spending steadily and the economy growing at its fastest pace in nearly four decades, businesses have been desperate to fill a record level of open jobs. Companies large and small have raised wages to find and keep workers.
INDUSTRIES RECOVER
Out of 11 major industries in the U.S. economy, six have regained all the jobs they lost during the pandemic recession. Most other industries are fairly close.
The one exception: Leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants, bars, hotels, amusement parks and other forms of recreation. One of America’s biggest employers, leisure and hospitality still has 1.5 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic, a decline of 8.7%.
RACIAL GAPS DECLINE
The nation’s most stubborn racial unemployment gap — that between Black and white workers — narrowed a bit in March. Unemployment for Black Americans dropped to 6.2%, down from 6.6%, while for whites it slipped to 3.2%, from 3.3%. That three-point gap is smaller than a year ago, when Black workers’ unemployment was 9.5%, and for whites it was 5.3%.
Still, unemployment for Black workers remains nearly double that of whites, a durable ratio that William Darity, an economist at Duke University, has called “a powerful index of discrimination.”