Solid report is nothing to celebrate
Hiring in US slows down with 1.8M jobs added in July
WASHINGTON — The United States added 1.8 million jobs in July, a pullback from the gains of May and June and evidence that the resurgent coronavirus has weakened hiring and the economic rebound.
At any other time, hiring at that level would be seen as a blowout gain. But after employers shed 22 million jobs in March and April, much larger increases are needed to heal the job market. The hiring of the past three months has recovered only 42% of the jobs lost to the pandemicinduced recession, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released Friday.
With much of the nation having paused or reversed plans to restore economic activity, many employers are still reluctant or unable to hire and consumers remain generally hesitant to shop, travel or eat out. Until the health crisis is solved through a vaccine or an effective treatment, most experts say the economy will struggle to sustain any recovery.
Though the unemployment rate fell last month from 11.1% to 10.2%, that level still exceeds the highest rate during the 20072009 Great Recession.
“The progress is encouraging, but let’s not lose sight of where we currently are,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at the jobs website Indeed. “By both the unemployment rate and the cumulative hit to employment, the current labor market crisis is worse than the Great Recession.“
The jobs report emerged as new infections run at about 55,000 a day. While that’s down from a peak of well over 70,000 in the second half of July, cases are rising in about half of the states, and deaths are climbing in many of them.
The acceleration of the viral outbreak that began in late June more than doubled the daily U.S. confirmed case count by midJuly. The rate of new reported cases has since declined.
In the United States, there have been more than 4.9 million confirmed coronavirus cases, with over 160,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, there have been more than 19 million confirmed cases and almost 717,000 deaths, the same count said. But many health experts, however, believe that the figures represent an undercount of actual cases and deaths.
Evidence suggests
the pandemic’s damage to the economy will take longer to mend than was envisioned in the spring. Back then, the widespread hope was that temporarily shutting down the economy would defeat the virus, after which businesses could quickly reopen and call back their laid-off workers.
Those recalls are happening, and they accounted for the bulk of July’s job gain. But the resurgence of the virus in much of the country has reversed some reopenings and likely made it harder for many people to get back to work. Nearly half the unemployed have been jobless for 15 weeks or more, up from just onetenth in May. And the number of Americans who say their job losses are permanent was flat last month.
The proportion of Americans working or looking for work also slipped to 61.4%, down 2 percentage points from February. That signals that the job gains of the past few months haven’t encouraged many people to start seeking work.
Friday’s report suggested, too, that high unemployment and shriveled incomes for many households will remain an issue through the November elections and a potential threat to President Donald Trump’s reelection prospects.
Trump celebrated the report with a pair of tweets, including one that read “Great Jobs Numbers!” But aides are nervous that the recovery is still fragile. The president remained out of sight Friday, beginning a three-day weekend at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.
His Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, was quick to blame Trump for the potentially faltering recovery.
“It did not have to be this bad. We are in a deeper economic hole than we should be because of Donald Trump’s historic failure to respond to the pandemic, and the pace of recovery has now slowed because of Trump’s continuing inability to come up with a plan to control the virus,” Biden said. “He is the one person in the country who should lose his job.”
July’s job gain was much lower than June’s 4.8 million and May’s 2.7 million. Hiring weakened last month in a range of industries. Manufacturing added just 26,000 jobs — less than one-tenth of its June gain. And some industries not directly affected by the pandemic, such as banking, cut jobs.
The economy is struggling to emerge from the devastating recession that caused the economy to shrink at a nearly 33% annual rate in the AprilJune quarter, the worst quarterly decline on record.
The economy has since started to grow again, and many economists have forecast a solid rebound in the July-September quarter, though not nearly enough to offset the second quarter’s dizzying fall.