However, the apparent improvement in the labour market covered up ongoing weakness in the sectors most severely affected by the pandemic. Specifically, hotels and restaurants.
According to the September jobs report, employment in the hospitality sector, which includes hotels, is still the primary obstacle to returning the labour market to its pre-pandemic condition.
The employment level in the food services and drinking establishments sector increased by 61,000 in September, bringing it back to its February 2020 level. In this industry, 12,368,400 persons were employed as of September; by February 2020, this number would rise to 12,338,900.
In contrast, employment in accommodations was 10.3% lower than it had been prior to the pandemic. The number of employees in this industry increased by 16,000 last month, bringing the total to 1,895,500; in February 2020, there will be 2,054,500 employees in this industry.
The only significant industry tracked by the BLS that has not recovered its pandemic-induced losses is leisure and hospitality, and this shortfall in accommodations employment accounts for more than all of that gap.
The number of jobs employed in leisure and hospitality fell just 184,000 short of February 2020 levels as of September. Employment in the leisure and hospitality sector, which includes the accommodation and food services sector, was 187,500 jobs below these levels. And as we see above, the lack of lodgings is the only factor contributing to the difference.
Overall, the US labour market added 336,000 new positions in September, more than double Wall Street’s prediction of 170,000. This report provided the most recent evidence that the economy is still more resilient than many economists had predicted.
“The labour market remains robust,” stated Bank of America economist Stephen Juneau in a client note on Friday.
A further point made by Juneau was that “high-touch services sectors [like] education and health, leisure and hospitality, and other services” account for 55% of the job growth this year.In other words, hiring is still happening quickly in the industries that lagged behind the revival of the labour market overall.
The robustness of this recovery and the encouraging lack of pandemic-related residual harm may be seen in the fact that we are slicing the industry employment statistics this thinly to identify the remaining gaps in the labour market.