With unemployment checks being cut for millions of Americans, you may think that people would be returning to work. That hypothesis was proven wrong last month as the U.S. Bureau Labor of Statistics released their latest job report. While expecting to add 500,000 jobs, the economy witnessed only 194,000 jobs (Lahiff). This may be due to several factors spanning from San Francisco to New York City, including but not limited to an increase in COVID-19 cases, Hurricane Ida, and the wildfires in California. Slowed job growth isn’t new news over the past couple of months, as the country has seen slowed job growth since July. For the moment, even increased wages aren’t enticing enough to bring people back into the workforce.
Slowed job growth has hit 2 sectors particularly hard: restaurants and bars as well as education. It should not be a surprise that the peak of Delta variant is the most influential factor keeping people out of restaurants and schools; in particular, the number of women in the workforce. While accounting for a majority of jobs related to education, 26,000 women lost their jobs last month. With hopes of the Delta variant beginning to taper off, jobs in both the restaurant and education sectors should expect some resurgence in the coming months. Robert Frick, economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, did give the market hope when he noted that hiring did pick up at the end of the month while also expecting that trend to continue through October.
The next few weeks will likely have a large impact on Fed policy moving forward. The next Fed meeting is set for November, and people should expect its next move(s) to depend highly on job growth over the next few weeks.
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