These days, the rest of the monthly jobs report can feel like opening a time capsule. According to the data for June, which was released todaythe recovery from the COVID-19 recession was still chugging along out in the middle of last month, when the two surveys to form that the backbone of the report were conducted. The unemployment rate fell from 13.3 percent in May to 11.1 percent in June and 4.8 million more people were employed in June than in May.
The figures look promising — but it’s important to remember that they’re just a snapshot of what the economy looked like in mid-June. And the lot that has changed since then. More importantly, COVID-19 infections “have spiked in states across the countryand many governors have rolled back the phased reopenings that brought many jobless workers back into the labor force. That could have a seismic impact on the sectors of the economy, like leisure and hospitality, saw that the biggest gains in June.
Even underneath-the-surface-of-the-Years report, there were signs that the recession is deepening. Crucially, the number of workers who have permanently lost their jobs, rose quite a bit — signaling, in that it is an increasing number of Americans getting back to work and there won’t be an easy matter. The unemployment rate for white, the Act continues to be much lower than the unemployment rate for Black, Hispanic or Asian Americans. That’s an important reminder that ” some are workers continuing to do much better than others the recovery creaks into gear.
If you just focus on the report”s headline number, the unemployment rate and the number of payroll jobs that are part of the country”s economic situation was looking up in June. In fact, the drop in the unemployment rate may have been even more than the dramatic topline number lets on. Over the past few months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been struggling with an issue that’s unique to our pandemic-ridden times, A substantial number of workers were reporting that they were absent from their jobs for the entire week would be referenced in the survey for “other reasons.” That’s probably they were meant to temporarily out of work because of the COVID-to 19 — but they weren’t counted in the unemployed.
To be clear, The BLS has been extremely transparent about the presence of this problem, and it does not mean that the numbers were fudged. Our methods for measuring unemployment are not simply designed for pandemic-induced recession. But it is important to take the misclassification issue into account, because if those workers had been included in the April BLS estimates that the unemployment rate is the would have been to about 20 percent; in May, the rate would have been about 16 percent. By June, the BLS reported that it mostly had the misclassification issue under control — which meant the current unemployment rate has declined even more substantially, to around 12 percent.
Bear in mind, though, that means that we still have a long way to go before we’re anywhere near pre-pandemic levels of unemployment. It’s all about your frame of reference, An 11.1 percent unemployment rate is stunningly low compared with where we were in April, when close to 20 percent of the population was unemployed. But it’s still higher than at any point in modern history — the ratio of the unemployment rate is at the apex of the Great Recession.
And there are many reasons to believe that the recovery could stall or even backslide in the coming months. One track is tucked in the June report, Of those who did it for jobs, a larger share of them were permanent than in the previous month.
In April and May, 88.6 percent of the job losses were classified by the BLS as “temporary,” which do not fit the early theme of this recession: Businesses shut down temporarily to stop the spread of the COVID-19 but to the planned reopen later the virus came under control — particularly with the assistance of government loans, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, which incentivized small businesses to keep employees on payroll during the closures. But in June, the share of the job losses that were temporary fell to 78.6 percent, a sign that a growing number of workers will not have a job waiting for them when the crisis lifts.
“The more job losses become permanent, in this recession, will look more and more like an ordinary recession, where, in recent history, the recovery has been a slow slog,” said Nick Bunker, the director of economic research for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, a research institute connected to the job-search site Indeed. “That is by no means the hopes of a quick recovery will be slimmer and slimmer.”
The fact that some of the industries hit the hardest, early-in-the-recession-made ” big gains in June-is-so-good-and-bad-news. Leisure and hospitality, which had lost a staggering your the 8.3 million jobs, in March and April, it built on its May gains-to-add 2.1 million more workers in June, an increase of nearly 21 percent month over month. Similarly, the retail trade, which lost 2.4 million jobs, in March and April, bounced back, with about 740,000 new workers in June, a 5.4 percent increase month over month. And education and health services, which is another industry one of the most affected, with over 2.8 million, of total job losses in March and April), added 568,000 jobs in June, is a 2.6 percent gain month over month.
Overall, almost every major industry, sector of the economy added jobs in June, with total private employment, up by 4.3 percent since May. However, it is worth, alexander, that despite the better-than-expected jobs reports in both May and now June, total private employment is still down 10.2 percent relative to its pre-crisis level in February. Things are looking better, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
The hammer might fall, yet again, on sectors like leisure and hospitality, which includes the restaurant industry. Several states that are allowed restaurants and even bar and casino to reopen at partial capacity in May and June, and only to the abruptly close them again in a case when counts started to spike. That means that some of the workers, who finally got to return to their jobs on the servers, waiter or blackjack dealer-might as well be unemployed again in the March report.
That everything these days is in a state of flux complicates even the most seasoned experts’ ability to read the report. Erica Groshen, who served with the BLS commissioner, from 2013 to 2017, it said, it is extremely an person to isolate the impact of the many different forces that are churning underneath the river. “We’ve got all of these links that are going at cross-purposes,” she said. “We have the ongoing effects of the restrictions in place. We have been to the effect of some restrictions being lifted. And we have the deepening of the recession itself.” All of that, she said, makes it hard to assess exactly what’s happening under the surface — much less what will happen next.
And again, the gains have not been equally distributed throughout the population — another name of this the people are very unequal recession. Although the unemployment rate for women dropped at a faster rate (2.8 percentage points) than for men (1.6 in) in June, the women still had a higher overall unemployment rate than men did. Likewise, the unemployment rate for white, Act, dropped by 2.3 percentage points last month, while it only fell by 1.4 percent for Black Americans, and 1.2 percentage points for Asian Americans. And at 15.4 percent, the Black Act is still to have the highest unemployment rate of any racial or ethnic group, a 5.3 percentage points higher than their white album counterparts.
Perhaps the one bit of encouraging data in this job’s report was that the unemployment rate for Latin or Hispanic Act did drop by quite a bit, it was down 3.1 percentage points in June. However, that still left their overall unemployment rate is at 14.5 percent, which is not only far higher than before-it-was-the-coronavirus recession began (it was 4.4 percent in February) but also higher than the unemployment rate for white (10.1 percent) or Asian (13.8 percent) of the acts.
All we’ve said often during this crisis, you really need the the next jobs report in order to interpret the current one. The June report shows that the unexpected employment gains of the May were not impressive, the economy really did start recovering earlier quickly, and more than many economists expected. But next month’s report could be a sobering reminder of just how fragile any economic gains are — at least for a while, the virus is still spiraling out of control in many parts of the country. So we’ll know better by next month whether the concerning trends in this report have deepened, as well as how much of the recent COVID-19 outbreaks across the country have hamstrung the nascent recovery. In typical fashionour economic data is moving at a much slower pace than the virus, which leaves us guessing at where things might head next.
