Recently, the jobs report for the month of November has been released and gives a muddled but hopeful picture for the future of the economy. After many worries of labor market disruptions plaguing the U.S. supply chain, there appears to still be justified fears of this issue as the jobs added in the month missed expectations by almost half. Expected jobs added was 500,000 while in reality, only 210,000 jobs were added. This has also been somewhat disappointing as economists were hopeful that a strong Black Friday and e-commerce sale would pull the economy upwards. However, it has not come to fruition entirely. However, there are still hopeful signs that the economy is making progress to fully recover from the pandemic. Firstly, many industries that were badly affected by COVID-19 continue to grow back in hopes of achieving productivity levels seen before 2020. Industries include hospitality, travel, airlines, and retailers. Job growth for these respective sectors have continued to rise moderately which suggests that the economy is still expanding in certain areas even as other sectors overheat or begin to slow down. Another sign of recovery is the increase in women returning to work after the sudden transition of schooling to online classes at the outset of the pandemic. Especially with a fragile economic situation during 2020, it made it even harder for women to find work that could align with their family life. In the short term, I think this job report shows that there may be more turbulence to be expected as the economy begins to slow down. Coupled with the current supply chain issues, inflationary pressure has begun to creep in and has already increased the prices of everyday goods. But I am hopeful for the future as the U.S. slowly recovers from this hiccup in growth and continues to ride the wave of this historic recovery. Credit: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/economy/584297-five-things-to-know-about-the-november-jobs-report
3 comments:
I think the U.S. economy is experiencing a structural change in terms of employment. It is suspected that some industries in which occupations are easily replaceable by machines would never return to the pre-pandemic level due to the advancement of technologies during the pandemic. Besides looking at the industry, it would also be interesting to see the change in full-time/part-time jobs. My intuition is that the proportion of the gig economy has expanded and will keep expanding due to the increasing insurance costs caused by rising medical risks for in-person jobs.
While it seems like adding less jobs is worrisome, the biggest issue is not adding more jobs, it's getting people to go and sign up for the jobs that are already available. As Hanna discussed, I would suspect to see more and more companies begin to use machines instead of people for jobs. Then it is unlikely to add workers back in place of the machines because machines are expensive and more efficient than humans. This would decrease the number of jobs available and hopefully bring supply and demand closer together so that we can return to a "normal" equilibrium.
It didn't occur to me that women had a decrease in the work force, however it does make sense given women are often the primary caregiver for children. As schools begin to open back up, women will become more available to go back to work and it may trickle into daycare attendance, too. Increasing the demand for daycare workers would also increase number of jobs.
I really enjoyed reading this blog. It is not looking great out for the job market in the coming future. Its infrastructure is changing before our eyes and could spell a drastic change for the future of occupations. With the large move to digital, the job market looks to stand no chance, especially with the looming thought of inflation due to the extremely high wages being offered in the market.
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