February was another strong month for job creation in the United States, though that is likely to be overshadowed for understandable reasons this week. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 678,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making for a second month in a row that exceeded expectations. Revisions for December and January added another 92,000 jobs. The unemployment rate edged down to 3.8%.
“We added 678,000 jobs in February, for a total of 7.9 million jobs added since the end of 2020. It’s mindbogglingly fast and sustained growth—well over half a million jobs added per month on average for more than a year,” the Economic Policy Institute's (EPI) Heidi Shierholz tweeted. “At this point, more than 9 out of every 10 jobs lost during the recession have been regained.”
While Shierholz cautioned that “there is still a long way to go,” she highlighted the importance of policy in the fast recovery. “We are on pace to recover EIGHT YEARS faster than we recovered from the Great Recession. Why do we have such a fast recovery this time around when other recent recoveries have been so weak? That’s because of CARES and ARPA,” she wrote. “Totally unlike in the Great Recession and its aftermath, Congress did what was needed to spur a strong recovery this time around. We would have MILLIONS fewer jobs today if Congress had not enacted the Covid relief and recovery measures it did.”
The EPI’s Elise Gould offered graphs to show the strength of the recovery:
All that said, there are still key areas of weakness in the economic recovery. One of the most troubling is the persistent high unemployment for Black workers, especially Black women. “Unemployment rates either remained the same (white women) or trended down (Asian men, Asian women, Black men, Latinos, Latinas, white men) for all groups 20 and over, with one notable exception: Black women,” the National Women’s Law Center pointed out in a release. “The unemployment rate for Black women aged 20 and over increased from 5.8% in January to 6.1% in February 2022.”
Additionally, while private sector employment has largely recovered, the jobs recovery is lagging in the public sector. There are still 681,000 fewer public sector jobs than there were before the pandemic.
Overall, though, the recovery is remarkably strong now considering the depths of the COVID-19 crash—again, thanks to Congress doing what needed to be done.