Job added lower than expected.

Looks like Biden isn't doing that well as people want him to.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/economy/april-jobs-report-pandemic-anniversary/index.html

he US economy added only 266,000 jobs in April at the anniversary of the worst job loss for any month on record. This was far less than forecasts of economists, who had predicted America would add 1 million jobs last month.

The unemployment rate rose to 6.1% in April, up from 6% a month earlier.It was the slowest improvement for jobs since January. Experts predicted that the vaccine rollout and the reopening of the economy would jolt hiring. But the April jobs number show that the road to recovery from the pandemic remains bumpy.The job market isn't just snapping back to what it was before Covid-19. The dislocations across different industries and worker demographics has been too big to recover from while Covid-19 continues to infect tens of thousands of people every day.Lower-income earners, women, Hispanic and Black workers bore the brunt of the pandemic layoffs and millions remain out of work. Yet some industries can't find workers. That may seem contradictory, but the job market is changing, leaving many workers permanently out of a job.The hospitality, leisure and travel industries are still rebuilding after shuttering completely last year. Meanwhile, factories and manufacturers have trouble finding specialized and even entry-level workers as employees worry that those jobs could be sent overseas or replaced by robots.

Fair enough. Blame him for the jobs due to covid. But be fair and blame trump for losing them in the first place.

@LJS9502_basic: I blame both.

i think i know how this is supposed to work.

good jobs report under a president you don't like: "these numbers don't reflect the real economy"
good jobs report under a president you do like: "see, <insert president here> is teh bestest president evah! bigly!"

bad jobs report under a president you don't like: "see <insert president here> is a fucking idiot and will destroy us all!"
bad jobs report under a president you do like: "these numbers don't reflect the real economy"

Hasn't that been the rule for the last 50 years?

@comp_atkins: This report is complicated, I love it.

Obviously it’s not going to be a smooth recovery, especially given all that debt. Some months will be good and others bad, this has been the case in every country.

Biden isn’t a magician, he has a mountain to climb before the US economy is back on track to a 2-4% annual GDP growth and inflation around 2%.

Sounds like we should pass Biden's jobs/infrastructure plan in that case to help get the country moving in the right direction.

What say you tc? Down for a bill that would create a bunch of blue collar jobs?

I'm all for people having jobs and putting food on the table. How much pork is in the bill? I really haven't read it.

Let’s blame Biden for a problem he didn’t cause

@joebones5000: Yes, but we're aiming for a quicker bounce back. If we end up with the same prepandemic per month average over the next year+, we've failed.

The numbers I've seen are quite bizarre. I think it's worth waiting until the true numbers are in and a correction has been made. The immediate responses from politicians is that a labor shortage is here due to high unemployment benefits, but I don't think that is the main driver.

That, and we could see a massive rebound after May. TLDR, don't get too caught up in a single months data point. It doesn't tell the whole story.

I don't doubt the numbers are fairly accurate - maybe a 50% bump or so as a best case scenario which would still put us well below the target. But the partial numbers are weird - leisure and hospitality overperformed relative to other sectors which would normally be expected, but wouldn't be expected in a UI fueled crunch. White collar jobs underperformed, which may be due to the retirements rabbit mentioned above. The data is spotty by region to boot. And As far as a labor shortage is concerned, we may be seeing a slight one? We saw small bumps in wages and hours worked which are among the first signs we look for in diagnosing one (since employers cry wolf on the so often, even in the depths of recession like in 2009-2013, we can safely ignore all that noise), so there may be something to it. Whether it's UI driven - maybe partially? I don't think we have enough data to really conclude one way or the other yet, but it seems plausible to me.

Certainly, the level of panic from... ahem... certain politicians and stakeholders doesn't match the data, but it seems worth watching to me. I'd be interested in knowing where you disagree with me here.

I think that there is obviously some impact based on UBI. I just think people will be latching onto that as a knee jerk response. NPR had a good link as to recent effects of increase benefits with respect to economic impact and labor targets. I'm also not against rolling back the boosted 300 per month, I think it's about time we start it honestly. With that being said, I am always of the mindset that JUST looking at jobs numbers is meaningless (as is unemployment). If these jobs that were to be added paid minimum wage, I'd have to ask 'then what is the point', as many of these same people would still be on some form of assistance to meet the basic standards of living. What does 4% unemployment mean when 1/3 of the people in the work force are still living in poverty due to low wages?

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BFI_WP_2021-19.pdf

I think it's best to wait for real numbers and the adjustment and see where we are at in May.

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/05/07/analysis-its-not-a-labor-shortage-its-a-massive-reassessment-of-work-in-america/

But another way to look at this is there is a great re-assessment going on in the U.S. economy. It’s happening on a lot of different levels. At the most basic level, people are still hesitant to return to work until they are fully vaccinated and their children are back in school and daycare full-time. For example, all the job gains in April went to men. The number of women employed or looking for work fell by 64,000, a reminder that childcare issues are still in play.

There is also growing evidence - both anecdotal and in surveys - that a lot of people want to do something different with their lives than they did before the pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are re-assessing what they want to do and how they want to work, whether in an office, at home or some hybrid combination...

Wage data from April is also telling. When companies, especially fast-food restaurants, complain they can’t find workers, the common retort is “why don’t these companies raise pay?” In fact, there is evidence that restaurants are raising pay. The average hourly rate in the hospitality sector is up roughly $1 compared to the pre-pandemic going rate. But the bigger issue appears to be that warehouses have hiked wages by more than a dollar and now pay $26 an hour on average - far more than the roughly $18 average in hospitality...

Even among those who have jobs, people are rethinking their options. Frontline workers are reporting high levels of burnout, causing some to seek a new career path. There’s also been a wave of retirements as workers over 50 quit because they don’t want to return to teaching, home health care or other frontline jobs. And more affluent Americans say they are retiring early because their retirement portfolios have surged in the past year and the pandemic has taught them that life is short. They don’t want to spend as much time at a desk, even if it is safe.

The article is long. Quoted some parts I found interesting. It seems like people want something else.

It's not like the past, employers don't need to hire as many workers since they have robots or some other technology that improves the product and the amount with less man power needed. That's why we see the stock market doing amazing but the jobs numbers being crap. Theres no longer a 1 to 1 relation between number of jobs and the health of the economy.

Biden is having one of the worst first year in US modern day history.

sheev does do that....

i dig the user name!

The twitter rants to jobs added ratio is pathetic.

@mattbbpl: this reminds me that I need to give my governor a call about this. Indiana is looking to end the fed unemployment extras so people go back to work for less money than they are currently getting rather than pushing employers to compete with the unemployment money and compensate people better.

@Serraph105: Indiana? Good luck.

@mattbbpl: ****, I know right?

@Serraph105: Why would you want live in Indiana?

@thenation: I ask myself that question way too often.

@Serraph105: Do you have any experience with Carmel? My sister lives there, and the local political scene is fascinating.

there is also not a 1:1 relation between the stock market and the health of the economy

@comp_atkins: Yeah, higher stock market performance can be driven by factors as unrelated as too much capital chasing too few investment opportunities. Ie, even with an underperforming economy stock prices could rise because the amount of capital increases. This is particularly true in years with low rates (forcing a larger share of capital into equities), rising inequality (which tends to allocate a larger share of the economy into capital rather than consumption), and macro scale stock buyback trends (decreasing the shares of capital for that money to be spent on).

The stock market is closer to a consumer market than an economic barometer.

@mattbbpl: no, Carmel is in Indy and I'm down at bottom of the very state in Evansville. Technically I did work at a hospital in Carmel for a very short period of time back in 2012, but that's as far as my "experience" goes. What does your sister say about the place?

@blaznwiipspman1: "It's not like the past, employers don't need to hire as many workers since they have robots or some other technology that improves the product and the amount with less man power needed."

This hasn't stopped businesses from complaining that they can't get people to work for them while the extra unemployment money is available to them.

yeah for sure there's shortages in things like the trades. It takes a lot of training to become a tradesman and not enough people have those skills. Theres also simple manufacturing jobs that are undergoing a lot of change right now due to tech improvements. People don't like doing these repetitive, super boring jobs either, it can drive a person crazy if they don't have the patience to punch some hole in some plastic for 10 hours straight. Then theres the transportation jobs such as truck driving which is really tough to do, lack of sleep for hours on end, and minimal breaks. That is possible to bear but the future doesn't look so bright for these jobs either, with the autonomous driving right around the corner. The only thing holding this back is regulations so not many people want to invest their time and money going into that field either. Who can blame them?

Its not all bad though, theres also jobs being created that weren't there before, unfortunately many of these jobs are very highly skilled.

@Serraph105: They have some really bizarre habits of denying their own situation. The one that's the weirdest is that they insist they're a low spending Republican city, but they rack up debt every year with projects like their outdoor tv viewing area, converting all their intersections into roundabouts, etc. Bit the most irritating habit along the same vein is that they have a perpetual shortage of minimum wage work for retail and restaurants, but they refuse to raise wages on principal or to build lower income housing to allow people who work those jobs to live in the area. They want to have their cake and eat it too, and they feel entitled to both. Their city development forums are unreal.