Employment fell sharply in all broad business sectors last month and across all groups of workers, with particularly large increases in unemployment among women, college dropouts and Hispanics.
The U.S. jobless rate eclipsed the previous record rate of 10.8% for data tracing back to 1948, though it was well below the 25% rate economists estimate was reached during the Great Depression. The job losses due to business closures triggered by the pandemic produced by far the steepest monthly decline on records back to 1939. By comparison, nearly 2 million jobs were lost in one month in 1945, at the end of World War II.
Many economists project April will be the worst single month of job loss during the pandemic, and the pace of layoffs has already shown signs of easing this month. But they say it could still be many months before the labor market returns to a point when U.S. employers consistently add jobs, and it probably will take years for the economy to fully replace the jobs lost in April.
The Labor Department survey of households showed a large number of workers who said they were “employed but absent from work.” Many of those should have been counted as a temporary layoff, which would have caused the unemployment rate to be almost 5 percentage points higher, the department said.
The job losses and high unemployment mark a sharp pivot from just a few months ago, when the economy was pumping out hundreds of thousands of new jobs and joblessness was hovering near 50-year lows. The jobs bust has been widespread.
Leisure and hospitality businesses, among the first to be affected by coronavirus-related shutdowns, saw particularly heavy losses, cutting 7.65 million jobs. The health-care, education, retail and professional services industries all experienced major losses.
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