As remarkable as the rebound has proven to be, the comeback from the low point in April 2020 has not been evenly spread across industries and demographic groups, with restaurant employment, for instance, still in a deep hole and the share of Black women with jobs trailing the recovery in other groups.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.
Hiring for transportation and warehousing businesses, in contrast, rose early on as more people turned to online shopping and food delivery services. Those gains have continued, with industry employment now 10% above pre-pandemic levels, far more than any other sector.The share of Black Americans who are either working or looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, was equal to the share for white workers in both January and February of this year.
The employment-to-population ratio for Black women, or the share of the population that is working, is still 2.9 percentage points below where it was in February 2020 after it dropped last month. That is nearly double the 1.5-percentage-point shortfall faced by all women and almost three times the gap left for all men when compared to pre-pandemic levels.
In all, just 388,000 people aged 25 and above who had not completed high school were without a job in February, roughly a fifth of the number out of work in April 2020. That is also nearly 100,000 below the previous record low in September 2019.The number of workers being added to company payrolls has remained robust over the last year, averaging more than 550,000 a month, a level never seen prior to the pandemic.