US jobless rate at 7.9% as hiring slows before election

With 661K jobs added, economist notes ‘loss of momentum’

WASHINGTON — The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.9% in September, but hiring is slowing and many Americans have given up looking for work, the government said Friday in the final jobs report before voters decide whether to give President Donald Trump another term.

With 31 days to go before Election Day, the Labor Department said employers added just 661,000 jobs in September amid the coronavirus outbreak, down from 1.5 million in August and 1.8 million in July.

Unemployment fell from8.4% in August, but that mainly reflected a decline in the number of people seeking work, rather than a surge in hiring. The government doesn’t count people as unemployed if they aren’t actively looking for a job.

“There seems to be a worrisome loss of momentum,” said Drew Matus, an economist at MetLife Investment Management. “There’s a lot of caution on the part of employers.”

The economy has recovered slightly more than half the 22 million jobs wiped out by the coronavirus, which has now killed more than 208,000 Americans and infected more than 7 million, according to Johns Hopkins University. With many businesses and customers plagued by fear and uncertainty, some economists say it could take as long as late 2023 for the job market to fully recover.

This week, moreover, brought a new wave of layoff announcements reflecting the continuing slump in travel and tourism: Disney is cutting 28,000 jobs, Allstate will shed 3,800, and U.S. airlines said as many as 40,000 employees are losing their jobs this month as federal aid to the industry expires.

In another problematic sign in Friday’s report, the number of laid-off workers who say their jobs are gone for good rose from 3.4 million to 3.8 million.

While unemployment has tumbled from April, when it topped out at 14.7%, a rate unseen since the depression in the 1930s, it is still high by historical standards. And it is a far cry from where it was in February, before the outbreak took hold in the United States: 3.5%, amore than 50-year low.

Friday’s numbers offered voters a final look at themost important barometer of the economy before the Nov. 3 presidential election — an election whose outcome was thrown into deeper uncertainty by the announcement Friday that Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus.

President Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 even with unemployment at 7.8% on the eve of the election.

And even as the economy has struggled to sustain a recovery, it has remained one of the few bright spots in Trump’s otherwise weak political standing. Roughly half of voters approve of his performance on the economy.

The September jobs report showed that women in their prime working years are quitting their jobs and leaving the workforce at much higher rates than men, a sign that manywomen are staying home to help their children with remote schooling.

“Women continue to bear the brunt of this recession,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “They are supervising at-home schooling.”