The September jobs report, the last one before the election, revealed the economy only added 661,000 jobs.
However, the unemployment rate sits at 7.9%. The economy has also recovered 12 million jobs since the COVID-19 outbreak in mid-March, which saw around 22 million layoffs.
Economists estimated 850,000 new jobs in September. The labor participation rate sunk to 61.4%, a decrease of 0.3%.
The employment-population ratio is at 56.6%.
The unemployment rate fell by 0.5% to 7.9%. The unemployed persons number declined by 1 million to 12.6 million.
Both of those measures fell for five consecutive months.
Temporary layoffs went down by 1.5 million to 4.6 million, well below the 18.1 million in April.
Unemployment rates dipped in four of the major groups: adult men, adult women, whites, and Asians.
Teenagers, blacks, and Hispanics saw little change in unemployment rates.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many businesses to shut down. This could explain why permanent job losses increased by 345,000 to 3.8 million in September. Also, unemployed job leavers (people who quit or volunteer to leave and look for new employment) went up by 212,000 to 801,000.
Other points in the report:
Every sector added jobs, except for government:
The country is slowly reopening, but governments have started to instill new lockdowns and restrictions as some areas see outbreaks.
Weekends are busy for some businesses, but the weekdays remain slow:
Andrew Fritz, co-owner of Citizen Public House restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz., voluntarily reduced his dining room hours and capacity in July as new coronavirus cases in the state spiked. He increased those hours and rehired workers about a month later, but said the restaurant is still operating with less than half of its pre-pandemic staff. Sales over the past two months have fluctuated around half the levels seen a year earlier.Mr. Fritz said demand has been strong on the weekends. During the week, he added, business has been much weaker and more customers are ordering carryout meals, which tend to have a lower sales value.“We’re shedding money every week,” Mr. Fritz said. He expects the restaurant could break even if revenue rose by another $5,000 to $10,000 a week. “But a break-even scenario is a really ugly scenario, because we’re doing it by cutting peoples’ salaries and wages and hours.”
I imagine weekend business will continue to boom since football season kicked off a few weeks ago.
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