America’s employers boosted their hiring last month, adding a solid 531,000 jobs, the most since July and a sign that the recovery from the pandemic recession is overcoming a virus-induced slowdown.
Friday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 4.6% last month from 4.8% in September. That is a comparatively low level though still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5%. And the report showed that the job gains in August and September weren’t as weak as initially reported. The government revised its estimate of hiring for those two months by a hefty combined 235,000 jobs.
All told, the figures point to an economy that is steadily recovering from the pandemic recession, with healthy consumer spending prompting companies in nearly every industry to add workers. Though the effects of COVID-19 are still causing severe supply shortages, heightening inflation and keeping many people out of the workforce, employers are finding gradually more success in filling near record-high job postings.
“This is the kind of recovery we can get when we are not sidelined by a surge in COVID cases,” said Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the employment website Indeed. “The speed of employment gains has faltered at times this year, but the underlying momentum of the U.S. labor market is quite clear.”
By most barometers, the economic recovery appears solidly on track. Services companies in such areas as retail, banking and warehousing have reported a sharp jump in sales. Sales of new and existing homes surged last month. And consumer confidence rose in October after three straight declines.
At the same time, though, the nation remains 4.7 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic flattened the economy in March 2020. The effects of the virus are still discouraging some people from traveling, shopping, eating out and attending entertainment venues. The least-advantaged Americans, many of them women and people of color, are still struggling.
In October, the pickup in hiring was spread across nearly every major industry, with only government employers reporting a job loss, mostly in education. Shipping and warehousing companies added 54,000 jobs. The battered leisure and hospitality sector, which includes, restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues, gained 164,000. Manufacturers, despite their struggles with supply shortages, added 60,000, the most since June 2020.
And employers, who have been competing to fill jobs from a diminished pool of applicants, raised wages at a solid clip: Average hourly pay jumped 4.9 percent in October compared with a year earlier, up from 4.6 percent the previous month. Even a gain that strong, though, is barely keeping pace with recent surges in consumer inflation.
One disappointing note in Friday’s report is that the workforce — the number of people either working or looking for a job — was unchanged in October. That suggested that the reopening of schools in September, the waning of the virus, and the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement have yet to coax many people off the sidelines of the job market in large numbers.
Drawing many people back into the workforce after recessions is typically a prolonged process. There are now 7.4 million people officially out of work — just 1.7 million more than in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy. Yet millions more who lost jobs during the recession have given up their job hunts, and employers might have to raise pay and benefits to draw them back in, said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota.
