The Current Employment Outlook

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s recent employment situation summary, the economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, far fewer than economists had predicted. It was the weakest month of job growth since January. The labor market is far from being fully recovered. Even with last month’s gains, there are still 8.2 million fewer workers on payrolls than before the pandemic.

In general, employment is stagnant. The following rates were essentially unchanged in April.

• The unemployment rate (6.1%) and the number of unemployed persons (9.8 million)
• Among the unemployed, the number of persons on temporary layoff remained at 2.1 million.
• The number of persons jobless less than five weeks increased by 237,000 to 2.4 million, while the number of persons jobless 15 to 26 weeks declined by 188,000 to 1.2 million. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), at 4.2 million, was unchanged.
• The number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons decreased by 583,000 to 5.2 million. This decline reflected a drop in the number of people whose hours were cut due to slack work or business conditions.
• The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was 6.6. Among those not in the labor force who currently want a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force remained at 1.9 million. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was little changed at 565,000.
• Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (6.1 percent), adult women (5.6 percent), teenagers (12.3 percent), Whites (5.3 percent), Blacks (9.7 percent), Asians (5.7 percent), and Hispanics (7.9 percent) showed little or no change in April.

We can only hope that things will improve as more people are vaccinated and businesses begin to open closer to capacity.

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