(Reuters) – The latest job boom delivered during President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday handed the Republican a cloak that no politician would envy: he will be the only modern president to leave office with fewer jobs in the United States than when his term began.
A global pandemic that Trump, who lost his candidacy for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden in November, came too late to recognize and was prone to downplay or deny it through much of his course, it destroyed the U.S. economy in the last year of his tenure. He erased any appearance of the booming labor market that he hoped would turn it into a second term.
Instead, as reported by the Department of Labor on Friday, total U.S. employment fell in December by 140,000 to 142.6 million, about 10 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic hit. coronavirus.
Economic records will count January employment figures in Trump’s column since he left office at the end of the month on January 20th. This month’s data will be announced in early February.
But there are no realistic expectations that payrolls will recover enough to close the gap of approximately 3 million jobs between the level of December and January 2017, when Trump took office.
Graph: The Trump job market: the boom fell in a year,
Trump’s last year in office was marked by economic superlatives, effectively all provoked by COVID-19 and the wave of restrictions on business and activity imposed to try to contain its rapid and deadly spread.
The outbreak, which has now infected nearly 21.5 million U.S. residents and killed more than 365,000, triggered the fastest and deepest recession of the post-World War II era.
The unemployment rate rose from a half-century low of 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in just two months, as more than 22 million people were laid off. Although it has dropped to 6.7%, it is 2 percentage points higher than when it was invested.
On this front, at least, Trump has company: he is the third consecutive Republican president to step down with a higher unemployment rate than his inauguration. Both President George W. Bush and President George HW Bush oversaw rising unemployment rates during their tenures.
Graph: Trump’s labor market: unemployment rose,
During his first three years in office, Trump often pointed to the black labor market improving in strong speeches, claiming that no other American president had done so much to improve the number of African Americans.
Some data prove it. The black unemployment rate at the end of 2019 fell to 5.2%, the lowest since the Department of Labor began monitoring it. That was almost 2 points higher than the white rate.
By December 2019, black employment levels across the country had risen 8.1% from where they were when Democrat Barack Obama – the first black president and Trump’s predecessor – stepped down. By contrast, employment growth for whites was 3.3%, albeit from a much larger base.
But COVID-19 ended all of those gains, and while black employment levels have moved closer to where they were at the start of Trump’s term, levels for blacks and whites remain for under.
Graph: The Trump job market: black and white,
Trump came to office promising a renaissance of the manufacturing industry as part of his first agenda in the United States under which he faced imported goods and companies that had shipped factories overseas.
There was a modest improvement in its first three years, with an increase of 3.8% in total manufacturing employment. But other sectors, especially services, accounted for the majority of labor gains until then.
And it was in the services sector that COVID-19 hit its hardest.
Jobs in the leisure and hospitality industries, in particular, suffered measures to prevent the spread of the disease, and the new rise in infections has revisited the pain of the sector. Although 140,000 jobs were lost overall last month, nearly 500,000 were lost in leisure and hospitality, and total employment in the sector is 18.5% lower than when Trump swore the charge.
And what about manufacturing? Today there are 60,000 fewer jobs in the factory than in January 2017.
Graph: The Trump labor market: great variation by sectors,
Dan Burns Reports; Edited by Cynthia Osterman