| | April's jobs report falls well below expectations |
| | | - The April jobs report is out, and it’s the worse miss relative to expectations in decades. Economists thought increased vaccinations and continued spending could yield up to 1 million new jobs this month. Instead, the US added 266,000. [Axios / Courtenay Brown]
- The numbers represent the lowest gain in jobs since January, signaling that the national economic recovery is not likely to be linear, and that it’s difficult to achieve true growth while tens of thousands of people a day are still getting sick. Job gains from March were also revised down from 916,000 to 770,000. [CNN / Anneken Tappe]
- Experts believe the economy’s slow performance this month is in part due to a shortage of available workers. The jobs, they say, are there. [CNBC / Jeff Cox]
- “I think this is just as much about a shortage in labor supply as it is about a shortage of labor demand,” Harvard economist and former Obama adviser Jason Furman told CNBC. “If you look at April, it appears that there were about 1.1 unemployed workers for every job opening. So there are a lot of jobs out there, there is just still not a lot of labor supply.” [CNBC / Jeff Cox]
- Wages actually grew, which appears to confirm a labor shortage. The largest job gains were seen in the hospitality industry, with 331,000 people hired chiefly to work at restaurants and bars. Business services lost 79,000 jobs; couriers and messengers lost another 77,000. [USA Today / Paul Davidson]
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