By many metrics, April was a historically bad month for business and employment. The economy lost more than 20 million jobs due to widespreadcoronavirus-induced closures and disruptions, triggering fears of a new Great Depression as the unemployment rate soared close to 15%. But somewhat improbably, newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics data from May suggests that the U.S. economy might just manage to steer clear of the worst of those forecasts. The latest jobsreportindicates that total non-farm payroll employment rose by 2.5 million in May, dropping the unemployment rate to 13.3% from April’s 14.7%. The report credits those increases to “a limited resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to contain it.” TheNew York Times,Bloomberg,and others reported the news.
The employment increases spanned a variety of economic sectors, with the exception of information, mining, and transportation and warehousing. Asconstruction activity resumed, the sector added 464,000 jobs, nearly half of what it lost in April. Retail regained 368,000 of April’s 2.3 million lost jobs, while manufacturing replaced 225,000 of the 1.3 million jobs that disappeared over the prior month.
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On a more granular level, the report also had good news for the design sector. Home furnishings stores added 40,400 jobs in May. However, May’s total of 292,900 jobs is still a ways off from the 473,200 people employed in the sector back in May 2019. The number of jobs related to the manufacture of furniture and related products also increased by 20,900 from April to May for a current total of 330,500.
Though these numbers encourage at least cautious optimism about the prospects of economic recovery, a very important caveat to the report’s methodology suggests actual economic activity might not be as robust as the numbers imply. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on survey data, the report admits that “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported” if workers who were absent from work for “other reasons” had been classified as unemployed or temporarily laid off. Chalk it up to one more way the pandemic has created confusion about the state of the economy.
同样重要的是要注意,增加employment were not evenly distributed. While white and Hispanic or Latino employment fell more than 1%, Black unemployment actually increased slightly. Moreover, while the data is encouraging in the short term, it’s far too early to celebrate anything resembling a recovery—especially given the possibility of a second COVID-19 wave that could swiftly reverse any progress toward complete and total reopening. As we’ve learned so far in 2020, a lot can change in the blink of an eye.
