Thread by @bencasselman

Jobs day charts thread! (Will be adding gradually because I'm writing the main story today, which you can find here: nytimes.com/2020/10/02/bus…)

Even after the recent gains, we still have nearly 11 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic, and progress is slowing. By comparison, we lost 8.7 million jobs in the Great Recession.

The worst news in this report: The number of people reporting they have lost their jobs permanently (as opposed to being on temporary layoff/furlough) rose again. Evidence of mounting long-run damage to the economy.
nytimes.com/live/2020/10/0…

Back in April, nearly 80% of unemployed workers said they were only temporarily out of work. Now it's less than 40%.

To be clear, that's partly the result of rising permanent job losses, but it's *mostly* the result of furloughed employees being called back to work. Number of people on temporary layoff has fallen dramatically.

Measures of permanent or "core" (per @JedKolko definition) unemployment are rising, but are still nowhere close to as bad in the Great Recession.

The "misclassification" issue, in which people who should be counted as unemployed are instead counted as employed but absent, is still around, but shrinking. Unemployment rate would have been about four tenths of a point higher without the issue.

The leisure & hospitality sector added 300k jobs in September, but remains 3.8 million in the hole relative to February. And notable that it actually lost jobs on a non-seasonally adjusted basis -- this is usually a month when hotels cut jobs, so a small loss shows up as a gain.

The only major sector to *lose* jobs in September was government, which cut 200k+. That's partly the result of the end of temporary census jobs (-40k). But it mostly reflects big cuts to local school districts.

(Though for consistency's sake, I should note that local education actually added jobs on a not seasonally adjusted basis. It's just a much smaller gain than in most years.)

The "goods" side of the economy has held up much better than services. But construction and manufacturing aren't exactly going gangbusters -- certainly not enough to offset the struggles of the service side of the economy.

The employment rate ticked up in September, but it's barely halfway back to where it was before the pandemic, and it's still way below the worst of the last recession.
And among prime-age workers (25-54), the employment rate actually fell.

The drop in prime-age employment was entirely among women, who are bearing the brunt of school closures. See @jeannasmialek's more detailed discussion of this here:
nytimes.com/live/2020/10/0…

Long-term unemployment -- the great scourge of the last recession -- is rising again. Already, 2.4 million Americans have been out of work for more than six months, and that's only the beginning.
nytimes.com/live/2020/10/0…

The slowdown shows up clearly in the gross flows data. The number of unemployed people getting jobs fell. The number of employed people losing jobs rose. (Note this is true regardless of whether you focus on official unemployment or include flows into/out of the labor force.)