The Trump regime and its fanboys in parts of the media were gleeful when the government’s August jobs report came out at the beginning of last month, showing that 1.5 million Americans had returned to their jobs in August (or had found new ones) as parts of the economy reopened after the coronavirus shutdown. All part of a soaring economy that would soon be great again, Trump said, while his amplifiers, including those in much of the business press and other media gave somewhat modulated assessments saying the same thing. While there were warning signs, on the surface at least, a bit of optimism wasn’t wholly out of place.
It was another story when the weak September jobs report was released Friday, showing a steep slide in the tempo of the economic recovery—661,000 job gains with a 7.9% official unemployment rate that stemmed mostly from the fact that 695,000 people left the workforce in September. Trump himself was running a fever and had other matters on his mind. The media and economic analysts were almost uniformly negative. Words like “sputter,” “long slog,” “disturbing,” “worrisome,” and “permanent job loss” were sprinkled throughout press coverage.
One red flag can be found in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ labor force participation rate, which fell a sharp 0.3% to 61.4% in September. What’s worse is that of the 1.1 million people who stopped working or stopped looking for work last month, 865,000 were women, as The Washington Post reported.
Many economists say it’s a clear sign of the child-care burden falling mainly on working mothers.
Mothers like April Smith are facing impossible decisions, as they must choose between earning money during an unprecedented economic crisis, and staying home to shepherd their children through chaotic virtual classes.
An annual study published by Lean In found that 25% of surveyed women were thinking about downsizing their careers because of the pandemic, the first time in six years of research that the study found evidence of women planning to leave their jobs at higher rates than men.
Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th reported:
September and the start of school added another ingredient to that bitter cocktail. Public sector job loss has already started, leaving many teachers out of work. Last month, government employment dropped by 216,000 jobs, most of that driven by losses in education. Many districts have returned to school in a hybrid model, meaning parents have also had to make arrangements for kids who are spending at least part of the week in virtual instruction. [...]
Of the women who dropped out of work last month, 324,000 were Latinas and 58,000 were Black women.
Inequality becomes more apparent during recessions than in good economic times, with women, people of color, and people under 34 faring the worst. But, as The Post reported earlier this week, the Pandemic Recession “is the most unequal in modern U.S. history.” Latinos saw the worst initial employment losses, and they are still farthest behind in getting back to where they were in February. And while white Americans have recovered well over half the jobs they lost in the pandemic, African Americans have only recovered about a third of the jobs they’ve lost.
White women, for example, have recovered 61 percent of the jobs they lost — the most of any demographic group — while Black women have recovered only 34 percent, according to Labor Department data through August. And workers with college degrees are 55 percent recovered, compared with less than 40 percent for workers with high school degrees. [...]
“It’s an even more unequal recession than usual,” said Ben Bernanke, who led the Federal Reserve through the Great Recession. “The sectors most deeply affected by covid disproportionately employ women, minorities and lower-income workers.”
In the third quarter running from July-September, 23% of the long-term unemployed were Latinos and 21% were African Americans, in both cases well beyond their share of the population. According to Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global Ratings, “It will be much harder to bring back that workforce in an economy that’s moving into a long, slow recovery A lot of the businesses where those workers lost jobs are now gone.”
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute predicts that the slowdown shown in the latest jobs report means full recovery could be years away.
Unfortunately, the labor market distress is long from over. The economic pain easily extends to over 30 million people in the economy today. That doesn’t include people who had lost their jobs and regained employment but got behind on their bills—or those who lost loved ones and providers to illness. The pandemic continues to spread, including into the White House, and may worsen in the winter months along with increasing numbers of evictions. Further, recent reports of impending layoffs (for instance, here and here) suggest even more trouble on the horizon.
It is a simple fact that the labor market damage would be significantly lessened by vital public health investments and economic relief for today’s workforce as well as state and local governments. There were large losses in the public sector in September, not only because of the decrease of temporary Census workers, but more acutely because of the losses in local K-12 education. Education employment was already suffering prior to the current economy crises. School systems need more, not fewer, resources in these challenging times.
Instead of providing those resources, state and local policymakers are seeing their tax revenues plummet, and public sector jobs are starting to go the same direction, with those 216,000 government layoffs tallied in the September report. Without additional federal assistance, that situation will almost certainly worsen.
What should be remembered is that when the pandemic and the Pandemic Recession are over, the economic inequalities will lessen, but they won’t disappear. Comprehensive new policies, not just tweaks around the edges, will be required to accomplish that.