New York (CNN) — Economists have closely watched the monthly US jobs reports for signs of cracks in the labor market that might offer clues as to when a recession might start. But their predictions have been put to the test month after month with higher-than-expected increases.
Last month’s report was no exception.
Entrepreneurs created a whopping 339,000 new jobs in Mayexceeding the 190,000 jobs forecast by economists.
Employers have been hiring more workers every month since January 2021. This came as more parts of the economy gradually reopened after months of shutdowns.
In 2021, employers created an average of 606,000 jobs per month. These gains leveled off somewhat in 2022, averaging 399,000 jobs per month. That number has continued to decline this year, but is still impressively high at 314,000 average monthly earnings.
In all, 3.7 million more people were working last month than in February 2020, before the pandemic wreaked major disruptions to the US economy.
While many industries like transportation and warehousing have brought back all of their workers – and more – some industries are still struggling to bring back all the workers they lost due to the pandemic.
Sectors with a shortage of workers
There are four large sectors of the economy that employ fewer workers now compared to before the pandemic.
The leisure and hospitality sector is the one with the greatest shortage of workers, with a decrease of 349,000 people; that is, 2% of the total workforce prior to the pandemic.
At the height of the pandemic, workers in the leisure and hospitality sector suffered the most redundancies of all sectors, as venues closed during the lockdowns. But even as restaurants, bars and entertainment venues were allowed to reopen and people slowly began to travel again, workers did not seize the opportunity to get their old jobs back.
Instead, people found jobs in different industries that paid more and reduced their exposure to people, said Jim McCoy, senior vice president of talent solutions at ManpowerGroup, a leading staffing company.
“We’ve seen a huge conversion of people who work in restaurants to go work from home,” McCoy said. Many of these workers found remote employment in call centers and have stayed on the job ever since, she added.
Public jobs suffer the second biggest shortage of workers.
This sector covers a wide range of jobs, including workers in the health and postal services. But within that sector, most of the shortage of workers comes from public school teachers.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 118,000 fewer teachers nationwide last month compared to February 2020.
Like workers in the leisure and hospitality sector, many teachers quit their job fearing it would put them at greater risk of contracting covid.
“We’re not seeing people rejoin the workforce fast enough in other sectors to get some of those jobs back,” McCoy told CNN. Despite the shortage, public teaching jobs took much longer to raise wages than other sectors, likely due to state and local budget constraints.
But that has started to change recently.
“In the last year and a half we have seen that school districts and universities have made some progress in terms of salary improvements to keep up with the cost of living for their employees,” McCoy said.
