It’s a bit like the glass half full or empty. The employment figures in the United States remained weighed down by the Delta variant in September, but the economic recovery “is moving forward” in the country, assured the American president while defending the necessity of the gigantic plans of investments currently under discussion in Congress.
In September, 194,000 jobs were created, half less than expected, the Labor Department said on Friday. It is also well below the 366,000 new jobs in August. After more than a million jobs created in June and then in July, the pace had already slowed down considerably. The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 point to 4.8%, taking into account job creations in August higher than initially announced.
“Recovery trajectory”
“If you look at the trend, it is solid”, however estimated the American president.
Joe Biden also took the opportunity to plead for his two gigantic investment plans, which he hopes to pass and on which he is counting to ensure sustainable growth. “The employment figures also remind us that we still have work and necessary investments to make,” he said.
However, if the first plan, on infrastructure, is widely supported on the left as on the right, the other, which concerns social reforms, is very far from achieving unanimity, and the negotiations to come in Congress promise to be tense. .
There are still 5 million jobs missing compared to February 2020, before the pandemic, when the job market was at its best. And it is even, in reality, “nearly 18 million workers who remain affected,” notes economist Elise Gould, of the Economic Policy Institute, in a tweet.
In addition to the 7.7 million people officially unemployed, it does in fact include workers in forced part-time work, who have suffered a reduction in remuneration, who have left the labor market, or who are wrongly considered not to be Unemployed.
The optimistic Fed
“The effects of the Delta variant persisted in September and appear to have weighed” on employment, said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist for High Frequency Economics, in a note. However, she adds, “the labor market is on a gradual recovery path”.
These data reflect the situation at the start of the month, corresponding to the data collection period. Contaminations linked to the Delta variant only then began to decline, and still threatened the complete reopening of schools, while the exceptional unemployment benefits paid since the start of the pandemic had just expired.
“We believe that (September) marks the end of a series of weak employment reports,” also say Lydia Boussour and Gregory Daco, economists for Oxford Economics.
These figures could prompt the US Central Bank (Fed) to be patient before starting to reduce its asset purchases, which had supported the functioning of the economy during the crisis. But most economists are still expecting an announcement at the next meeting in early November: “job creation is in line with what the Federal Reserve needed (…); it will start in November, ”says Diane Swonk, chief economist for Grant Thornton.