GNB Desk): U.S. employers added just 49,000 jobs in January, after slashing downwardly revised 227,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The three-month trend is weak. After downward revisions to the data for both November and December totaling around 160,000, the economy has added an average of only 29,000 per month. This pace is far below the rate necessary to pull us out of the pandemic jobs deficit—there are about 10 million fewer jobs now relative to February.
While job gains were weak, the unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent, from 6.7 percent in December. This remains 2.8 percentage points above the rate in February 2020, before the pandemic. However, over this same time period, more than 4 million workers have dropped out of the labor force, disproportionately women.
January’s report, the first monthly release under President Joe Biden, is an improvement from December, which saw a reversal of 227,000 jobs. However, it does not even capture the millions of people economists estimate have dropped out of the labor force and are no longer looking for work. Nearly 18 million Americans continue to receive unemployment benefits of some kind.
In a statement, White House said on Friday-“This need for urgent, sustained action for the duration of this crisis is underscored by a few special questions that the Bureau of Labor Statistics added to its household survey. In January, just under 15 million people reported that they were “unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the pandemic.” This number has been about the same since October, after falling in the wake of the implementation of the CARES Act from May to September”.
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