Wow, the *direction* of job growth this morning was a wonderful surprise. But our jobs *level* remains in absolute crisis. In May, we added 2.5 million jobs. But in March and April, we lost 22 million, so we are still down 19.6 million jobs.
One deeply concerning thing is that we lost another 571,000 state and local government jobs in May, for a total of 1.6 million state and local government jobs lost in the last three months—*nearly half* of them in local government education (that’s basically public K-12).
The official unemployment rate in May was 13.3%, a welcome improvement from April, but *aside* from April, still worse than anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression.
And, the unemployment rate is not reflecting all coronavirus-related job losses. In fact, only about two-thirds of people who remain out of work as a result of the virus are showing up as unemployed.
About 15% (4.9 million) of those out of work because of the virus are being misclassified—they have been furloughed and should be counted as unemployed and on temporary layoff, but are instead being counted as “employed but not at work.”
Roughly a fifth (6.6 million) of those out of work because of the virus are being counted as having dropped out of the labor force. This is because jobless people are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, which remains impossible for many.
If all the 32.5 million workers who are out of work as a result of the virus had shown up as unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been 19.7% in May instead of 13.3%.
I’m going to take a minute to talk about how these #JobsDay numbers fit into the current context of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and more. These murders are rooted in this country’s long history of white supremacy.
Our history—and present—of white supremacy dramatically affect the labor market. Because of things like occupational segregation, discrimination, & other disparities rooted in systemic racism, recessions hit Black workers harder than white workers.
These #JobsDay numbers highlight the damage of the coronavirus recession—a recession that has caused greater job loss in black households than white households and that will, as a result, exacerbate existing racial inequalities.
In May, the white unemployment rate improved from 14.2% to 12.4%, but the Black unemployment rate did not improve (it ticked up from 16.7% to 16.8%). Our recovery is already showing signs of being deeply inequitable.
The Hispanic unemployment rate is the highest of any race or ethnicity reported in these numbers, at 17.6% in May.
It’s good news that both men and women saw unemployment declines in May, but the unemployment rate for women, at 14.5%, remains higher than the unemployment rate for men, 12.2%.
And for Black and Hispanic women, unemployment rates are even higher. The unemployment rate is 17.2% for Black women and 19.5% for Hispanic women (note, these rates are only available on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis).
One thing, there is virtually no chance these numbers are rigged. The integrity of the @BLS_gov process is unparalleled. In *any* administration, if there were any tampering, every career @BLS_gov employee would call every newspaper in the country.
This chart has three-month changes in employment by industry. Employment is still down across the entire economy, with huge holes in leisure and hospitality, education and health services, professional and business services, retail trade, and government.
