The American economy gained 194,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined from 5.2% to 4.8%.
This makes two months in a row of disappointing job growth, once again led by a collapse of growth in government jobs.
Why is job growth so anemic in the face of huge demand for workers? Expanded UI benefits have been ended completely, so that's not the explanation. But here's one possibility:
During the pandemic recession, personal savings skyrocketed as people socked away some of the government benefits they received. Then, as those benefits started to fade, they began drawing down those savings. However, savings remain higher than normal, suggesting that a fair number of workers are still living off savings while they look for a job. When those savings run out, they'll start to get a little more realistic and will begin accepting job offers that are OK but not great.
Maybe! This is just a guess on my part. But it makes sense.
It is always dangerous to extrapolate to a broader audience based on limited, and flawed, data. Recognizing the aforementioned, I had an insightful conversation with an Uber driver the other day. I commented that is was much more difficult to find a ride today, then before Covid. My driver responded, ‘Uber is a job but not exactly a pleasure. Lots of drivers will return when they need the money, but not before.’
Are you Tom Friedman's burner?
😉
I have friends in the service industry and they're "deciding" what to do next with their lives. They tell me they're not going back even with hourly rates increasing and living with friends in the meantime
Just one data point: my wife and my savings went up during COVID, in part due to: (1) not traveling or going out to eat anywhere near as much; and (2) her getting more money being unemployed (at least for a while) than at her job as a pre-school teacher.
Household jobs have surged. NFP is trash.
To my point, without IDA NFP numbers would have pretty much matched ADP from a private sector pov. So the establishment survey is missing workers due to a weather related event and it was a double whammy. A nice fat number is coming in the future to balance the book.
"... they'll start ... accepting job offers that are shitty but almost enough to live on."
FIFY.
Not if unvaxxx'd they won't.
Americans has been robbed blind in broad daylight ever since the Republican saint Reagan introduced “trickle down” .
It’s a “truth” in your country that if people are payed livable wages will it end in disaster and unemployment
An inconvenient truth from a Swede
As Robin Williams said--trickle down theory, and poor are getting pissed on...
I suppose that there are also a number of people who are risk averse who would like a job that doesn’t involve close contact with lots of people or having to enforce Covid rules on Trumpkins.
My employer has been on a hiring binge for months. They have scraped the bottom of the workforce barrel and found mostly terrible people. Two were fired after cursing out someone in the lockers room. Another quit after a complaint about his flirting. And an 18 year old was not available for work because, well, someone shot him outside. Gangs. He’s dead. This is what’s available for factory work.
You give these pathetic people a chance at a half way decent job and they still eff it up.
Even less wonderful people need to have a chance. This may be the only way they learn what it takes to keep a job. I once had a guy on my staff who had OCD. It was his first job and he’d gotten it at the age of 41. My predecessor hired him and put a lot of effort into him. He stayed a year and a half after I came in as the new boss, finally deciding he just couldn’t accept what I was trying to do with the department. But we both put in enough effort that I saw him go on to be successful in his next job. If you aren’t willing to invest in people in all kinds of ways, you perpetuate a permanent underclass.
Yes, as I have explained before. But as Kevin says it is a guess, like many explanations of what is going on. But workers have no more real leverage than they had before the pandemic so unless the big spending bills pass the job market will come back to earth.
1). Lots of dead employees from the pandemic and no mass immigration to replace them
2). Married Women with children staying out of the workforce (school hiring for teachers and staff was reportedly way down because there was no one to there to hire. Potential hirees were either dead or stayed away).
3). Lots of Boomer retirements or staying out of the workforce.
What many don't realize (especially on the Right) that for a long time the U.S. economy, especially its public and service economies functioned on married women with children and old people working past retirement age. The pandemic basically scrambled the calculuses they had for working. They could get by staying at home with the children instead of paying for expensive child care. The extra income wasn't worth potential illness or dealing with the jerks and the assholes demanding everything go back to "normal". There's plenty to do at home without being "bored".
The workforce and labor situation has changed and we have to take that into account now. A pandemic will do that. One thing is for certain: those who want to go back to "normal" either have to accept the fact that these open jobs in a variety of industries will only be filled by immigrants or not at all. Your choice.
Dude, 80% of all deaths were retired. Your post is lol bad. Until Kevin puts IDA in its place, this thread is dead.
"Dude," retired people still work. Those school buses weren't driven by strapping young lads were they? Tell people for years that their Social Security isn't going to be worth anything and of course they're going to be in jobs they can work a few hours and make some extra coin. Of that 80 percent you say, trusting your figures, how many of those were truly infirm i.e. nursing home on convalescent ward persons and how many were people who still hustled off to McDonald's for the breakfast shift every morning? Hmmm?
Re: retired people still work.
Huh? By definition retired people are not working (for wages). Moreover the jobs going begging are mostly those like restaurant server which are generally done by younger people.
You mean not working a fulltime 9-to-5 job right? Plenty of ways to earn coin past 65 without having to put in a full day's work. That's the idea. Your bored at home, want some extra cash, drive a school bus or take small shift working at a small business.
Had a discussion on another board about this
I argue that boomers have left the work force. One person responded that there are some late boomers that are 57 years old. That is true if you believe that the last year of the baby boom was 64. But that would be kinda wonky because the baby boom peaked in 1958 though 59 and has decreased every since. I then said that those that were close to retirement age could get by, like those who now only work one job due to wage increases instead of two job by using their 401Ks and IRAs as a bridge to collecting Soc Sec at age 62. Of course they brought up the fact of the penalties for early withdrawal without thinking that the CARES Act eliminated most of the penalties for early with drawal as the pandemic was a hardship. Those withdrawals are substantial too:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/27/how-many-people-took-100000-from-retirement-plans-due-to-covid-19.html
These investment vehicles were not that popular until the 90s and the early boomers didn't take advantage of them, but eh late boomers did. S&P 500 had an annualized return of 8.8% from 2000 to 2019 so many IRA's did very well.
Reagan, Clinton, Obama and now Biden created SO MANY jobs and at the critical time of our population being working age !!!! Now we are seeing that large group leaving the work force. Some were of age so just quit working. Others weighed the risk of taking early withdrawals from IRA's etc and now that the penalties are waived or reduced, have cut back to make it to 62
AND at the same time.....the internet and computer age has brought about a whole new class of workers - IT folks. That along with new financial sector jobs and other industries that have come out lately - pandemic related like Door Dash, grubhub, Uner Eats etc. All of this happened at once it seems
We will soon be in a position where the republicans will cave to the pressure and admit we need low skilled immigrants to do low skilled, low paying jobs to keep their corporate masters bottom lines healthy. Yes, in the very same hotel, leisure, food service and restaurant industries -which showed the largest job growth !!
When I see Burger King paying a finders fee to current employees, on top of a $300 bonus payable after 6 weeks to new hires - you know things are tough.
Growing retired population, roaring economy and reluctance to get exposed to COVID all make for a very tight job market
What if there were fewer fast food places? What if they closed at 8 pm? What if all restaurants closed on Sunday or Monday? What if retail was only open 8 hours a day?
This is the adjustment. No more 24 hour 7 day food / retail.
Justin-
I agree but the problem is us old folks. We want everything to be open just on the chance that I could be driving late at night and get hungry? THAT is what the 24/7 economy gave us. It spoiled us rotten
But even at that there are sill a load of places that operate 24/7 or even just oddball shifts..........
And yes, I can remember the day before stores were open on Sunday. You made sure you had what you needed before stores closed on Saturday. It was a much simpler time.
But then again it wasn't just the United States that had a baby boom. The worlds population has tripled since WWII Estimated at 2.3B back then its now like 7.5B or something like that?
JIT, 24 hour news cycle, travel requiring 24 hour service stations along with a booming population lead to all of this. Now trucks are delivering goods to supermarkets at night and they have to be brought to the floor almost immediately, because of just in time.
One hiccup and the whole thing falls apart......as we have seen
Take a look at the birthrate chart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#/media/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg
After the big post WWII making babies time frame its been falling consistently
Yep, that I agree on. Unless you find more workers, those days are over.
Oh and 20 million Boomers have already died too which makes THAT group even smaller. Millennials are overtaking the boomers as the biggest age group
Those employers that treated their employees like slaves are now finding that they NEED those slaves - after the fact of course
To quote from Barry Ritholtz.
• Wages have lagged most measures of the economy — since the 1970s;
• Technology keeps creating and destroying entire market sectors;
• Demographics is increasing demand for specific jobs, and not just in health care;
• Household balance sheets are as cash rich and debt managed as ever;
• Actual wealth in the US is at record highs;
• 18 months of remote work have changed peoples’ perception of their jobs;
• Early retirement is pulling workers away from the labor market;
• Childcare remains a challenge in most of the country;
• Covid-19 is still a threat to frontline workers.
I think that just about covers the subject.
Secondlook-
I am so stealing that
But if the daycare portion of the BBB plan is initiated we may make the labor shortage even worse in an area that would allow some people to get back into the work force.
And the early retirement section affects everything else - along with COVID stress for our front line workers. But that is a great summary
Well, European countries with wildly different socio-seconomic identities have been providing child stipends for many decades. Apparently, it has had little effect on employment, and to the chagrin of policymakers, little change in birthrates.
All it has successfully done is produce better clothes, better fed, and healthier children. Oh, and better scores for those children in school...
**************Off Topic*************
https://www.wtae.com/amp/article/pennsylvania-covid-19-breakthrough-cases-rise/37910413
{snip}
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) —
The proportion of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations among vaccinated Pennsylvania residents rose sharply last month, though the shot remained broadly protective, according to new statewide health data obtained by The Associated Press.
The latest Department of Health data on so-called "breakthrough” infections shows that between Sept. 5 and Oct. 4, vaccinated people represented just over a quarter - 26% - of more than 135,000 new infections and nearly 5,000 hospital admissions across the state.
{snip}
So 35,000 of the new infections
And 1300 of the new hospitalizations
58% of the population FULLY vaccinated
Yes you can massage the figures to make the numbers LOOK smaller when you go back to January but then you forget DELTA which hit in June/July
And we don't know how many of many had COVID before because? Yeah we didn't test because we didn't want to know
There was also a new study released that said fully vaccinated people can spread COVID . Why? Well vaccines DO WORK for awhile. They lower serous cases and apparently they INCREASE the number of asymptomatic cases - where you have it but don't know it and if you have it and are not taking the ONGOING, CONTINUING precautions then you can spread it to the unvaxxed AND those that have waning protection !!!!!!
And the Merck pill ? I'm not sure about that one yet but 4,000% mark up?
We are not done. Herd immunity is a myth when the immunity developed is for a weaker version of DELTA and even THAT immunity is dwindling from month 3 onward if you have Pfizer and/or natural immunity.
If this were a mature virus and we had dealt with it over a period of say 5 or 6 years with different boosters etc I could possibly start believing in herd immunity. But we are nowhere near that level of maturity when it comes to COVID.
I hope I am wrong but I go back to various articles regarding how viruses mutate. The more people that have it the better the chance of a mutation happening. There are 12(?) strains of Delta? Not different enough to call any individual one a new variant but enough of a difference to make some vaccines less effective than others.
As cases come down and protections come off these break through stories will get bigger and bigger.
But 26%? After an 8 month break through rate of 6% and 7% cases among vaccinated people?
We are JUST NOW learning the long term, real time effectiveness of the vaccines. Unfortunately, the disease the vaccines were designed to address is no longer with us
We have a much more dangerous version
The faddish adoption of "economists' expectations" as a benchmark for assessing monthly employment figures is an irrational and unwelcome development. As recently as 2019, most reports focused on the unemployment rate as the significant data point, which it is. And it's declined steadily since January.
Republicans caved long ago. It's called illegal immigration. Your dumb.