Americans — particularly in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington — exhaled with relief Friday morning when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published its estimates of employment for the month of September. The country continues to add employment, despite the turbulence of the national and global economies, and to add them faster than analysts expect.
By now, the United States has regained all of the jobs lost in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In February 2020, the high-water mark before the emergence of the coronavirus, there were 152.5 million people working. In August, the first month to pass the February 2020 level, there were 152.8 million employed. In September, the figure topped 153 million for the first time on record.
Yet digging into the numbers, we see that the recovery has not been uniform. White Americans, male and female, are still employed at lower rates than they were before the pandemic emerged.
The BLS provides individual breakdowns of employment by race and (for Black, Hispanic and White Americans) by gender. In broad strokes, the pattern for all of these groups is similar: a giant drop followed by a decelerating return of employment.
The group that has rebounded the most is Asian Americans, now seeing employment 5.6 percent higher than in February 2020. The group that has gained employment since that month but at the slowest rate is Black Americans, for whom employment is now 1.4 percent higher than it was then. That’s because of Black men, for whom employment is 4.5 percent higher than in February 2020.
Black women have still not recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic; employment of Black women is 1.5 percent lower than it was in February 2020.
That’s just above White women, for whom employment is 1.6 percent lower than it was that month. Overall, White employment is still 0.8 percent below February 2020 levels.
You might notice that White Americans also saw a smaller drop in employment during the pandemic than other groups. It’s worth noting that employment data for smaller demographic groups tends to be more volatile, which is probably playing a role here. Overall, though, nearly a million fewer White people are working now than before the pandemic began.
Some of that may be a function of how race and age overlap. Older Americans are more likely to be White and previous months have shown that many White people, particularly baby boomers, are aging out of the workforce.
That said, the unemployment rates by demographic, which incorporate workforce participation, still show White Americans trailing. Again, the overall pattern is similar across groups.
But the unemployment rates for Whites overall and White men are still higher than they were in February 2020. (Rates are also higher for Hispanic men and Black women.)
Overall, of course, the news is good — even if that trend isn’t expected to continue. More Americans are working now than ever before, and for most groups, employment has recovered since the pandemic began.
Americans, and the White House, can breathe a bit easier — at least until the first Friday of November, when there’s a new jobs report.