Posted on Dec 3, 2019 2021 at 18:07
Slack in the job market. The US economy created 210,000 jobs in November, after 546,000 in October, according to figures released Friday by the Department of Labor’s statistics service. Economists expected twice as many job creations, and with 155 million salaried jobs, 3.9 million are still lacking compared to the level at the start of 2020. The unemployment rate has nevertheless fallen by 0.4 point, to 4.2% of the working population.
The picture is hardly satisfactory for the White House, against a backdrop of the threat of the new Omicron variant: modest job creation, but high consumer prices (+5 to + 6.2% over one year depending on the indicators) and a dynamic increase in the average hourly wage (+ 4.8% over one year) which makes some people fear a deleterious chain: the famous “price-wage loop” which would see prices rise under the effect of the increase in costs (especially wages), and employees asking for wage increases to compensate for inflation …
Job offer
“We were focused in recent months on the jobs lost during the crisis but we will now have to look at participation in the labor market”, judge Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. “If the participation rate increases, it is a sign that the labor supply is picking up and meeting demand, and this will limit wage inflation.” In November, the labor force participation rate climbed 0.2 points to 61.8%, but it is still 1.5 points lower than at the start of 2020 (63.3%), according to the figures published Friday.
Economists believe that a large proportion of workers leaving the labor market – they are no longer looking for work and are therefore not counted as unemployed – could return. “Of the five million people out of the labor market since the start of the pandemic, we can easily find 2.5 million, judge Gregory Daco. Someone 55 years old can come back if the salary offered is attractive and if they are no longer concerned about the virus ”. A study by the Kansas City Federal Reserve notes that part of the shortage of employees is linked to retirees who, during 2020 and 2021, would normally have returned to work, but were dissuaded from doing so by the crisis.
On the women’s side
For S&P Global Ratings too, the labor supply is expected to rebound: “42% of the drop in the labor force participation rate is due to structural changes and 58% of the drop is due to reasons that stem more directly from the pandemic, ”said the financial agency. For Ann Bovino, chief US economist, most of the labor pool will be found among women, who represent a majority of people in the prime of life (25-54 years) out of the population. active.
Employees who left the workforce were in dual-working households, offering them more flexibility, points out a note from Barclays. “Outside of retirements, it is likely that we will see most of the missing workers return to the American workforce,” note economists at the bank, which puts them in total at 4.4 million. “But since most of the explanatory factors – the risk of infection, childcare and excess savings – may take some time to resolve, we believe they will only gradually re-enter the workforce.” The bank expects a labor market participation rate of 62.5% by the end of 2022.
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