William: As we reported,
employers added 390,000 jobs in
may.
That is the 17th straight month
of job growth.
Over the past year, employers
have added more than 6.5 million
jobs.
Betsy Stevenson served as chief
economist for the department of
labor from 2010 to 2011.
She is now a professor of public
policy and economics at the
university of Michigan.
Great to have you on the
newshour.
We heard the president bragging
about today's numbers but also
cautioning that we are not going
to see similar blockbuster jobs
reports going into the future.
He said that was a good thing.
How do you see today's report?
Betsy: I think it is worth
thinking about how rapidly we
recovered.
If you go back to the 2008
recession, it took over eight
years for us to get unemployment
below 4%.
We did that with less than two
years.
We have got unemployment that is
stable at 3.6%, which is just
great.
It is really low unemployment.
And yet, at the same time, we
are seeing rapid job growth as
people are reentering a labor
force.
If we have unemployment at 3.6%,
how do we find nearly half a
million people to hire?
We do that by bringing people in
from the sidelines into the
labor force.
We are continuing to do that.
We have seen job growth is slow
a little bit to 400,000 the last
two months.
It was running at a faster clip
before that.
That can't go on forever.
We don't have that many people
in the country to bring back.
A couple more months of this
kind of growth, and we will be
back at the labor force
participation rate we had prior
to the pandemic.
We need to start thinking about,
and we get ourselves to a place
where we have the kind of growth
we were experiencing prior to
the pandemic?
And at that level of labor force
participation.
That is going to be adding
200,000, 100,000 jobs a month,
and growing steadily.
That is what bringing this labor
market in without really slowing
it is all about.
Bringing a bunch of people back
into the workforce, allowing us
to continue to grow, but
obviously, we can't grow at
400,000 jobs a month for forever
or we run out of people.
William: Rate.
We have not figured out a way to
manufacture new humans.
We are lacking in that
department.
There are certain set -- certain
sectors, there are still
employers that are really
looking for workers and have a
lot of open vacancies.
Betsy: There are a lot of
vacancies out there.
We are really still at record
high openings, and for most
people, what this means is the
opportunity is out there to find
a job that fits you well, that
pays what you want, that allows
you to meet work-family balance,
that is better than it has ever
been.
I hope lots of people are out
there looking for those new
opportunities.
We see it court -- see it across
a lot of industries.
Let's take the airline industry,
which is saying, we can't hire
people, we are cutting flights,
yet they have more people
employed in air transportation
then we had prior to the
pandemic.
What's going on?
Part of it might be that they
lost a lot of experienced
workers and it is taking time to
get the new people they are
hiring back up to speed.
It may be that the industry
itself has had to change because
of the pandemic.
Then you could switch over to
leisure and hospitality, which
has a lot of growth.
We have not seen demand come all
the way back.
We have not gotten all of the
workers back.
And they added over 80,000 jobs
in this past month, one of the
strongest sectors of growth.
It is growing because consumers
are continuing to increase their
demand for leisure and
hospitality.
What we saw in this report is if
you want to hire, they are
coming.
I think it's good news.
The markets did not like it.
But if employers have been
trying to hire all those people
and had not been able to hire
them, that is when you have to
worry.
What we saw this time was
employers wanted to hire,
workers wanted to take the jobs
and we saw expansion of 390,000
jobs.
William: I saw that you pointed
out today that women also had
surged back into the workforce
amongst those new employees.
What do you think is driving
that specifically?
Betsy: We have seen, in
particular, labor force
participation among women start
to increase over the last four
to six months.
Some of that may be due to the
fact that schools are finally
starting to settle down, not
sending kids home for as many --
you know, you have to do a two
week remote school because of
this covid outbreak.
Might be a little bit of that.
It could just be that it takes
time for people to reenter the
labor force.
Women took on other
responsibilities outside of the
labor force, caregiving
responsibilities, more broadly
than just their children.
They have to figure out how to
balance those responsibilities
that they took on with a job
they want to find.
It just takes a little bit of
time.
We have seen this steadily over
the last few months as women are
coming back.
What happens in most recoveries
and is happening in this one is
that the more highly educated --
more highly educated people come
back faster and first.
We see in particular, labor
force participation among
college-educated women recover
much faster.
But we are starting to see some
recovery in the labor force
participation of women with less
education.
That does tend to happen more
slowly.
I personally hope the economy
stays strong enough to bring
more of those women back in over
the next few months.
William: Betsy Stephenson at the
university of Michigan, thank
you so much for being here.
Betsy: Thank you.