All eyes will be on Friday’s US unemployment numbers to see how many jobs were added in March and whether the unemployment rate continues to stay in its historically low range or if it is time for the alarm bells to start ringing.
Job growth in the United States has continued at a steady clip in the months since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses came to a sudden stop.
“In the aftermath of the pandemic as things started to pick back up, there was a real struggle to find people to work and companies had to raise how much you paid to get people,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.
There are a number of factors behind that, including restrictions on the number of foreigners entering the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and baby boomers dropping out of the workforce for fear of the pandemic, creating nearly a shortage of some two million workers aged 55 and older.
As business ground to a halt as a result of the pandemic, nearly 22 million jobs were lost. A lot of the hiring since then has been about refilling those roles, said Dan North, senior economist at Allianz Trade, adding: “It’s not like those jobs went away.” Since the start of the pandemic, the US economy has lost 21,888,000 jobs and has added 27,387,000, according to government data. “You could argue that the economy has created only 5,499,000 new jobs,” said North.
But jobs are being created, nonetheless. While employment fell by 243,000 jobs in December 2020, following seven consecutive months of increases, the labour market has consistently added jobs each month since then, taking the US economy on a 38-month streak of monthly job gains.
If payroll employment is shown to have risen in March in Friday’s monthly jobs report, which is released at 8:30am local (12:30 GMT), then it will be a 39-month streak.
