Skip to content

Employment has recovered to pre-pandemic levels almost everywhere

The Wall Street Journal, like all of us, is puzzled by the economy. Why is it that even though economic growth is flat, companies are still trying to hire more workers?

A persistent economic puzzle is why labor is still so tight amid slowing growth....Monthly payrolls have grown an average of 438,000 from January through August, nearly three times their 2019 prepandemic pace. Many employers say they continue to struggle with large staffing shortages that built up during the pandemic and are reluctant to cut head count.

This got me curious: which industries are back to their old employment level and which are still struggling to restaff? Here's the answer:

Keep in mind that January 2020 was the peak of a 10-year expansion cycle and represented full employment virtually everywhere. We're now recovering from another recession and there's no special reason to think employment should already be higher than it was at the very end of the last recovery.

But it is. Total employment is half a million higher than it was before the pandemic, and this recovery includes virtually every individual industry. The only real exceptions are restaurants and hotels, which are 300-400,000 short of their pre-pandemic numbers, and government, which is 500,000 short.

And there's only one (1) industry that's substantially below its pre-pandemic employment in both percentage and absolute terms: hotels. That's it.

So this makes things even more puzzling. With the exception of hotels, there are no industries that are really hurting right now. And yet it seems like all of them are complaining. What's going on?

35 thoughts on “Employment has recovered to pre-pandemic levels almost everywhere

  1. exgop123

    Ownership will always complain about the cost of labor or the difficulty of finding workers without paying more. No special reason required.

  2. FirstThirtyMinutes

    It's real. Show up to an Oregon emergency department that lacks the required specialty, and you may be flown out of state due to lack of staffing in inpatient and rehab facilities.

  3. different_name

    "And yet it seems like all of them are complaining. What's going on?"

    I'm personally entertaining the idea that the victim strategy that evangelicals perfected, which then spread to the Republican party, is being adopted up by all white people.

    Works great for elites like Doll Hands and Weird Pillow Dude, so why not try it out and see how it plays?

    Of course, this all makes me hate humanity even more, but, eh, I'm a grouch.

      1. AbolishFederalIncomeTaxes

        Maybe because they are actually victims???Still haven't met a white person who would trade places with a black person of the same economic circumstances.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      The Party of Lincoln, having become the Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, seeks to find acceptance, or at least pity, by attempting to become the Party of Nelson Muntz.

  4. shapeofsociety

    Employment has returned to pre-pandemic levels in my household, now that my stepdad has ended his two-year pandemic sabbatical and returned to work. He is a school bus driver, and the local school district does not have enough drivers. There are kids not getting bused, parents frustrated with lack of communication, and the kids on my stepdad's bus were actually surprised when he got them to school on time. Stuff like that never happened in my hometown when I was a kid.

    The economy's current problems are not the usual issues of slack demand that typically cause recessions. The problems are on the supply side. The pandemic affected the economy like a hammer striking a piece of glass, sending cracks in many unpredictable directions, and much of the damage has yet to heal. I'm willing to bet that many people have left the workforce permanently due to death or long covid. Supply chains are being reordered. It will be a while before things really get back to normal.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Likewise.

        & I am on the yunger side of the Drum readership. (Graduated high school in '98. I still hope I had the time of my life.)

        1. DButch

          In college in the '69-74 we had this very strange passage by several dorms and a couple of frat houses where you would see people heading South, leaning into a stiff wind, and people heading North, leaning into a stiff wind. It became a bit of a running joke about personalized weather assignments...

      2. lawnorder

        When I was a kid, the "walk limit" was two miles. If you lived within two miles of the school you walked, or more likely rode a bicycle; if, like me, you lived five miles from the school you got a ride, except for the nearly half-mile from home to the bus stop.

      3. Austin

        My hometown used to have a 2 lane arterial road separating me from my school less than a mile away.

        That road has since been widened to 8 lanes. And the traffic lights have been retimed to maximize flow on the arterial - the green for the few cross streets that get a traffic light is only 20-30 seconds long, not long enough for a pedestrian to make it across the whole road in 1 cycle.

        There are reasons why fewer kids can walk to school that have nothing to do with distance or laziness and everything to do with how we design urbanized areas to be hostile/deadly for pedestrians.

        1. rrhersh

          I would drive my kids to their elementary school, as it was legitimately too far to walk. If I got them there at the early end of "on time" I would be behind the school buses pulling in. This included one whose final stop before entering the parking lot was literally on the edge of campus, with a sidewalk should one feel so moved. There literally is no radius within which the kids are expected to get themselves to school, entirely regardless of walkability issues.

      1. Austin

        No, but unless he enjoys/supports the existence of racists on his site, the racists do make his comment section very tedious to read. I too would pay Kevin to get a comment section that allows users to block certain toxic commenters from my view.

        In the same way that last night we all gave enough money so our friend having a birthday didn’t have to pay the bar tab (but yet also didn’t make a profit on inviting us to his party either)… I’m willing to help chip in so that Kevin’s site get rid itself of the racists at no cost (and no profit) to Kevin himself.

    1. geordie

      Personally I use a plug-in called Tampermonkey that allows you to modify what is shown in your browser. For this site it runs a script to remove all comments by the person I assume you are referring to from the page I see (and all responses). It has greatly increased my enjoyment of the comment section. It takes a little technical know how but is probably doable for any reasonably smart and motivated person. I agree with Tim Berners Lee that one of the great disappointments of the web is that publishing became a one-way static transaction. RSS feeds and Tampermonkey help a bit though.

      A simple one liner does what you ask for although I personally also widen the content area and reduce the whitespace on the borders so that I get to see his picture posts in a bit more of their glory without having to click on them.
      Complete script is:
      // ==UserScript==
      // @name Cleanup Kevin Blog
      // @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
      // @version 0.2
      // @description Makes reading the site more enjoyable
      // @author Geordie
      // @match https://jabberwocking.com/*
      // @icon https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=jabberwocking.com
      // @require http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js

      // @grant GM_addStyle
      // ==/UserScript==

      (function() {
      'use strict';
      document.getElementById("primary").style.width = "100%";
      document.getElementById("page").style.maxWidth = "1200px";
      window.jQuery('.comment-author-spadesofgrey').remove();
      })();

  5. Narsham

    One thing I'd want to know: how many full-time and part-time jobs were lost during COVID, and how many full-time and part-time jobs have been filled (or remain unfilled) since then? My general impression is that a lot of businesses cut full-time positions and now want to replace them with part-time workers, which might improve part-time pay but is still cheaper for the businesses. There's more than one labor market at play in this country right now.

  6. RadioTemotu

    Well hotels and restaurants both pay shit and treat workers as the same so with other jobs open it makes sense they’re looking for staff

  7. Jasper_in_Boston

    Total employment is half a million higher than it was before the pandemic, and this recovery includes virtually every individual industry.

    That's a time period of about 33 months. US population is up about 6 million since then. So a half million increase in the number of employed Americans, while pretty good under the circumstances, isn't all that amazing: we're still short a couple of million jobs in terms of the employed ratio.

    1. Austin

      Apparently we should always adjust for inflation when it comes to any monetary data, but adjusting for population growth is optional for Kevin.

  8. Vog46

    "Monthly payrolls have grown an average of 438,000 from January through August, nearly three times their 2019 prepandemic pace. "

    KD - I notice you haven't posted in a few days. That is a good thing.
    I think you are getting too mired in stats.
    You claim that the economy needs to create 90K jobs permonth just to keep pace with new workers entering the work force
    so from Jan to August 2022 Biden created MANY more jobs than that. You have pointed this our repeatedly
    While PAYROLLS have grown ONLY 438K. This translates into 438/8 or 54K per month. There are more people working than prior to the pandemic. Population growth did not STOP during the pandemic. And although we went into a brief recession because of the pandemic when we started coming out of it certain classifications which were mere "blips" prior to the pandemic exploded in growth. Food delivery and grocery delivery just to name 2. Internet order fulfillment is another as many people chose to stay home rather than risk getting sick
    Payrolls do not equal job creation. Companies are still hiring because job creation has exceeded the "90K per month needed to keep up with population growth" stat you keep harping on and immigration both legal and illegal is not filling the void.
    Take a breath. We are at full employment and have been for quite some time. Any retirees that want to come back into the fold CAN come back and HAVE come back - but not enough of them,
    Latest Unemployment rate in AZ is 3.5%
    Latest Unemployment rate in TX is 4.1%
    Latest Unemployment rate in CA is 4.1%
    The 3 states affected by immigration over the Mexican border are doing quite well in spite of the influx of immigrants.
    Figure out a way to get retirees back to work w/o hurting them financially or exposing them to COVID and things may improve but only slightly. We also need to streamline the immigration process

  9. Austin

    Just because industries like “retail” are up in aggregate doesn’t mean that there aren’t thousands of individual retailers struggling to fill positions. For example, if the local Walmart (using its massive profits to temporary boost wages) is hoovering up all the people interested in working “retail,” a town might show more overall “retail” employment that before the pandemic… and yet retailers elsewhere in the same town (with fewer financial resources to boost wages and still keep prices competitive with Walmart) might report small losses in their employment. Walmart hiring a 100 people covers up 99 small retailers each losing 1 person.

    1. Austin

      And thus doesn’t even get into the fact that categories like “air transportation” include a lot of very different non interchangeable jobs. If Delta had 1000 pilots, 2000 FAs, 1000 gate agents and 2000 phone bank attendants pre pandemic and now has 800 pilots, 1600 FAs, 800 gate agents and 3000 phone bank attendants, employment at Delta increased by 100 and yet the ability of Delta to offer as many flights today as it did in 2019 has obviously gone down by about 20%.

        1. Vog46

          Austin
          Nicely said
          We need to step back and measure available positions versus number of people currently or willing to fill those positions.
          The OTHER thing we have to do is come to grips with a concise way (and a consistent way) to determine what exactly is full employment.
          There are millions of people UNABLE to work they are considered unemployed. Then there are those that are transitioning into unemployment through retirement. 3.8% UI is BELOW full employment
          But think about this from PBS.org:
          {The number of Americans ages 65 and older is projected to nearly double from 52 million in 2018 to 95 million by 2060, and the 65-and-older age group’s share of the total population will rise from 16 percent to 23 percent}

          And this:
          {Average U.S. life expectancy increased from 68 years in 1950 to 78.6 years in 2017, in large part due to the reduction in mortality at older ages}

          It is very hard to determine what exactly IS full employment.
          We have a swelling population that is living much longer than what we lived to while WE were born.
          This will have HUGE consequences for the next couple of generations. We have got to find a way to engage the older folks to get back into the work place - OR - address the fact that this large swath of the population will have to DOWNGRADE their expectations for "service" when they go out, or on vacation etc.....

          Add to this mix declining birth rates and 23% of the population will be wanting INCREASED services from a declining population that is more highly educated and who won't work a service job.
          It will cause a lot of anger in a generation that feel entitled to services after a life time of work.

Comments are closed.