The August jobs report shows delta is claiming livelihoods

For months, the delta variant has been claiming lives. Now — much like the original strain of the coronavirus — it is also claiming livelihoods.

The U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs on net in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. This was only about a third of what economists had been forecasting — a huge disappointment. It is also a massive slowdown; over the previous six months, growth had averaged 703,000 jobs per month, culminating in more than a million jobs added in July alone.

We really need much faster growth, too. There are still roughly 5.3 million fewer jobs today than existed when the pandemic began last year. If August’s pace of hiring were to continue, it would take almost two more years before as many jobs existed as in February 2020.

So what went wrong? Why did hiring sputter? Delta’s fingerprints are all over this report.

The sectors most sensitive to COVID risk took a major beating. Food services and drinking places (that is, restaurants and bars) lost 41,500 jobs in August. The sector had been growing rapidly, averaging 227,000 jobs per month over the prior six months. That industry is deeply in the hole; there were almost a million fewer bar and restaurant jobs in August than there were when the pandemic began.

The retail industry also lost jobs. So did, somewhat counterintuitively, the health-care sector — perhaps a result of more hospitals delaying elective procedures, patients avoiding nursing homes and other congregant settings, and/or staff at those places burning out and quitting. Employment at child-care facilities — tenuous even before the pandemic — also fell.

Meanwhile, there were increases in economic activities likely to be boosted by higher COVID risk. The number of people who teleworked, for example, rose for the first time since December. Hiring also increased in the transportation and warehousing sector.

But warning signs are flashing. Privately produced data on restaurant and flight bookings show Americans are becoming more cautious. So what can be done to boost employment for the workers and industries at risk?

Note that many people have dropped out of the labor force entirely, which usually disqualifies them from receiving jobless benefits.

The best and most obvious remedy? Clamp down on covid transmissions. As has been the case since early 2020, the virus is in control of the economy; to get the economy back on firmer footing, we must control the virus.

This is easier said than done, of course, particularly in some Republican strongholds. In Florida and Texas, for instance, the governors have forbidden vaccination mandates, making it harder for consumers and workers to safely resume their normal economic lives. By barring schools from requiring students to wear masks, politicians have virtually ensured that more students will go into forced quarantine and schools will shut down again, jeopardizing both children’s academic progress and their parents’ work arrangements. But if governors want their economies to recover — and their voters to stay alive — they must get vaccination rates up and encourage (or, better yet, require) other complementary mitigation strategies, particularly for children too young to get vaccinated. The federal government, too, must use every available lever to encourage vaccination. That includes mandates or incentives for more sectors over which it has jurisdiction (such as air travel or medical facilities receiving federal dollars).

Instead, perversely, some Republican lawmakers are trying to block such measures, even as they complain about the slowdown in hiring that is the obvious result of uncontrolled covid spread.

As I said last month: The key to more jobs is more jabs.