U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the disappointing jobs report released in recent days points not only to fears among eligible workers about COVID-19’s highly contagious delta variant, but also an attitude shift in the American workforce.
“I think that we’re seeing people still living with the concern and maybe fear of the pandemic. Maybe their health is not necessarily the best and then they’re worried about their personal health,” Walsh said in a phone interview with the Tribune. The former Boston mayor, whose political star began to rise as a labor leader, said he’s also hearing from employers ranging from health care to financial institutions to construction who say some employees have reconsidered their professional path amid the pandemic and “have just left the job market because of their work-life balance.”
The U.S. logged 194,000 new jobs in September, according to monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. That’s less than half the 500,000 jobs economists were predicting would be added to the economy as enhanced federal unemployment benefits expired and a new school year brought the promise of a raft of teacher and support staff hires, which typically boost fall jobs numbers.
Neither scenario played out. Walsh said it’s clear to him the special federal unemployment benefits, which ended early last month, weren’t keeping people out of the workforce — an argument that picked up political steam as the pandemic wore on — or “we would have seen different numbers” in the recent jobs report.
He and his staff are trying to get a better understanding of why the public school hiring numbers were down.
“Historically we would see gains in those sectors at this time of year, because for the month of July and August, as mayor, I would have been spending a lot of time hiring people to open schools. For some reason we didn’t see enough of them. So we need to dive into that a little more to see what’s happening.”
Likewise, nursing and residential care facilities — whose patients and staff were hard hit during the pandemic — were down 38,000 jobs in September compared with a month earlier, according to Labor Department statistics.
“There’s no gain there (in nursing home jobs) — that’s a second straight month. So obviously this is a concern that we have to keep an eye on,” Walsh told the Tribune.
In Illinois, like the rest of the nation, health care workers have fled their jobs as pandemic-related burnout has set in. Illinois will release job numbers for September later this month. But as the Tribune reported in recent days, there is some data that offer a snapshot of that: As of September, there were 258,225 active nursing and advanced practice registered nurse licenses compared with 263,513 the year before, state records show.
And the leisure and hospitality industry saw just 74,000 jobs added to the economy, a sign that the public is still leery of heading to bars and restaurants with the highly contagious delta variant still spreading through communities.
Walsh, tapped by President Joe Biden to serve in his cabinet and on the job since March, pressed some of the same talking points as his boss — stressing that the jobs report didn’t signal trouble so much as it did glimmers of hope. The retail industry added 56,000 jobs in September following two months of stagnating numbers, according to Labor Department data. Meantime, 26,000 manufacturing jobs were added in September, but the industry is still down by 353,000 jobs since February 2020.
Walsh said, too, that the private sector added 317,000 jobs.
The overall unemployment rate is at 4.8%, down slightly from the previous month. It’s even lower — 4.2% — in the white community, but higher in the Black (7.9 %) and Hispanic (6.3%) communities.
Walsh sees improvements in the unemployment numbers for women, many of whom left the workforce to care for school-aged children during the pandemic. Overall, it sits at 4.2%, though unemployment among Black women is higher at 7.9%.
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“Those are good, good baselines and trending in the right direction, Walsh said. But the data points to long-standing racial and socioeconomic gaps that elected leaders, including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, have said in recent months must be bridged as the nation’s economy recovers from the pandemic.
“One of the primary focuses of the Department of Labor is to make sure that this recovery for people is an equitable recovery,” Walsh said.
Walsh sees the department leading that effort in pushing an agenda — and funding — job training programs that focus on diversity in job training, workforce development and pre-apprenticeships so that “we are … creating opportunities for people to get into (the) middle class.”
That training could also address another complexity in today’s job market, Walsh says. A recent Labor Department study showed that while there were 10.4 million job openings in August, the most recent data available, 8.4 million were looking for work, The Washington Post reported at the time. That’s because of a mismatch between available jobs and skilled workers to fill them, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Asked about when he expected to see the jobs market make a full recovery, Walsh offered no guarantees.
“Nobody can predict the future,” he said. “Obviously we’ll continue to take this recovery, one day at a time.”
Twitter @byldonovan