The Coronavirus Shutdowns Devastated Jobs Throughout U.S. Economy Except on Wall Street and in Government – By John Carney (Breitbart) / June 9 2020
Toward the end of the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States, workers were finally starting to gain enough of a foothold to see real benefits from economic growth. Unemployment was at a record low, long-stagnant wages were moving up while inflation was low, consumer confidence was sky-high, and more workers felt confident enough about the economy to quit their jobs in pursuit of better work.
The coronavirus pandemic, social distancing, and government-ordered shutdowns brought an end to all of that. The economy entered a recession in March, the National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday. The labor market underwent an unprecedented shock, something akin to a heart attack, suddenly shedding millions of jobs.
Data released by the Department of Labor on Tuesday in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, provide a kind of cardiogram to the sudden collapse in the functioning of the labor market. Nearly all of the economy went into cardiac arrest, with the notable exceptions of the federal government and the financial sector.
In April of 2019, six million workers were hired into new jobs in a single month, including 5.6 million private-sector jobs. Both were record-highs in data stretching back to the turn of the century. There were 7.2 million job openings and the economy added an additional 263,000 jobs in the month.
The Labor Department counted just 5.8 million Americans as unemployed, producing an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent, the lowest rate since 1969. Weekly jobless claims averaged 215,500, the lowest since 1969. The private-sector quits rates, the percentage of workers voluntarily leaving their job, was at the highest rate since 2005, indicating more workers were moving into better jobs.
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