Thread by @aaronsojourner

Happy #JobsReport.

Forecasts’ center:
+210K jobs, up from 49K last month
6.3% unemployment

8:30 ET @BLS_gov delivers the most-important signals abt how economy is changing. Hope you’re staying healthy.

The incomplete recovery stalled this fall as the virus surged again.

Since April, Americans' have had more lost jobs than the maximum job loss during the Great Recession.

The economy added 379,000 jobs in January and revisions to the prior two months added another 38,000 to the tally. That's the biggest gain since Oct.

However, we remain deep, deep in a hole. We remain below the level of Great Recession's job losses. Adding another 770K jobs would get us to the bottom of the Great Recession.

We are 11.8 million jobs below where we would be if the trend leading up to Feb 2020 had continued.

Here you can see the trend in the # of jobs including both the Great Recession and the current crisis.

Fiscal stimulus is providing relief & consumer demand. In 2021Q1, it's boosting economic growth at an 8.6% annualized rate.

🚨If Congress doesn't pass new measures, current fiscal policy will switch to slowing the economy in Q2 @BrookingsInst
brookings.edu/interactives/h…

Topline unemployment, labor force participation and employment-population rates all basically flat.

The share of adults employed is down 3.5 percentage points over the year, still below the trough of the Great Recession.

This is a public-health crisis first & we need to throw every productive resource we can at crushing the virus.

Among those not in the labor force in Feb, 4.2 million persons were prevented from looking for work due to the pandemic, down from 4.7 million in Jan.

Contrary to private-sector improvement, state & local governments are shedding employees, -86K driven largely by -68,600 jobs in education.

One surprising thing -- average work week hours fell in the private sector. It's been very elevated.

This may counter-intuitively be good news if firms are shifting from dealing with new labor demand by hiring, rather than just asking incumbent workers to work longer.

Relative to their pre-pandemic Feb 2020 levels, employment-to-population ratios remain most depressed for African-Americans (91.4%) and Hispanic Americans (92.2%)

No education group has recovered to its pre-pandemic employment-to-population ratio, though those with less formal education are doing worse.

In sum,

- a year into pandemic recession, we remain in a very deep hole, with more jobs lost than the Great Recession's worst

- some good news but trivial relative to challenge

- use every productive resource to crush virus

- get off contractionary fiscal policy course

Last thing. @BLS_gov does amazing work to create timely, accurate info about America's working families, a huge public good.

They are there for us & we need to show up for them.
If you are a labor economist or care about workers & employment, follow & join @Friends_of_BLS.