Bars are back, adding to September’s great jobs report
The U.S. economy added nearly twice as many jobs in September as economists had forecast, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that’s before you consider how much job growth was revised upward in July and August. All in all, it was an astonishingly good report.
Three milestones in particular are worth celebrating:
1. When COVID hit, the shuttering of businesses around the country and reluctance of consumers to dine out eliminated about half the jobs across the industry. That is, between February and April 2020, about 6 million restaurant and bar jobs vanished.
Even as the economy reopened, these employers struggled to hire back workers. Some longtime food services workers had decided to leave the business altogether, trading up to betterpaying or more humane positions. Some jumped from employer to employer amid the bidding war for staff. Declines in immigration - owing to pandemic-era policies and the Trump administration’s broader sabotage of immigration processing - hurt the industry as well, since foreign-born workers make up about a fifth of the sector’s jobs.
But bars and restaurants have steadily been recovering, and as of last month, employment levels were finally back to where then were in February 2020. It probably helps that more people are joining the labor force and immigration has largely normalized.
2. Public-sector employment also took a hit early in the pandemic. The sector overall has finally recovered all the jobs lost, though that milestone is entirely driven by growth in the federal government.
State and local governments are still deeply in the hole. Hence all those headlines about shortages of teachers, bus drivers, cops, corrections officers, etc.
To be clear, state and local governments have lots of vacancies but are struggling to fill them. This is the result of a collection of factors. The sector’s disproportionately older workforce is aging into retirement, for instance. Amid high inflation, wages in the private sector have risen much faster than those in the public sector (which already paid less for many equivalent roles).
Some government jobs (public health, education, elections, policing) have also grown much more stressful in recent years.
3. Despite all those warnings about a “she-cession” setting working women back a generation, working women seem to be doing better than ever. After some stagnation in women’s employment early in the 21st century, women ages 25 to 54 are more likely to be working today than at any previous time in history. This is thanks partly to demographic changes, partly to changing social norms and partly to changing working conditions.
The same milestone is not true of men. Prime-age men’s labor force participation is back to where it was prepandemic, but longer-term, it’s been trending downward.
--So: Does President Biden deserve credit for these remarkable numbers?
In his remarks Friday afternoon, he certainly claimed as much, saying, “It’s Bidenomics, growing the economy from the middle-out, bottom-up, not the top down.” In truth, presidents have very limited control over economic conditions but since he gets blamed for the bad things no matter what, it’s hard to chastise him for taking credit for the good ones.
To the extent “Bidenomics” is primarily about manufacturing and industrial policy, though, its fingerprints are not terribly visible in data so far.
When Biden spoke in celebration of the robust hiring numbers, manufacturing was the one and only sector he called out by name. The same was true last month.
But the recent hiring numbers show very little growth in the sector, even before taking into account the work stoppages related to the United Auto Workers’ strike. (If the strike had begun earlier in the month, the report might well have shown job losses rather than gains in the sector.) And over a longer-term horizon, manufacturing job growth since the pandemic began has been weaker than that in the rest of the economy. Other metrics suggest the sector has been contracting for the past 11 consecutive months.
But on the other hand: Claims that Biden is somehow discouraging Americans writ large from working, or otherwise hamstringing employers, are nowhere evident in the data. Employers are hiring, and Americans are ready to work.
Catherine Rampell is a columnist for The Washington Post.