A report from the Labor Department on the July jobs market in the United States has now been released, and the numbers show positive signs for the direction of the economy with the Biden administration at the helm. A full 943,000 jobs were added across the U.S. economy in July, according to the numbers, and this total is higher than a previous projection from economists guessing that the July jobs gain would be at 858,000. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate sunk to 5.4 percent in July, a decrease of some half a percentage point from the previous month’s unemployment rate of 5.9 percent. Trump predicted that the U.S. would suffer from economic devastation if Biden was elected, but he was incorrect.
Throughout the earlier parts of the pandemic, jobs numbers functioned as just about constant bearers of bad news, as the country struggled to tamp down the spread of COVID-19. In April of last year, the unemployment rate hit a full 14.8 percent in the wake of forced shutdowns across the economy. Businesses in hospitality and related fields were especially impacted, since there’s not exactly some way to translate a hotel experience or the like to an environment of mostly staying at home. Ahead of this July report, those same projections from economists estimated that the July unemployment rate would hit 5.7 percent, so on both overall job growth and the unemployment rate, the economy is beating expectations. (The economists’ projections in question come from a survey conducted by Bloomberg.)
In July, among the sectors with the highest job growth was leisure and hospitality, where 380,000 jobs were added during the month. There have been concerns amid the rapid spread of the so-called delta variant of COVID-19 about the potential of new so-called lockdowns in an effort to slow down the virus, but for now, authorities seem to be sticking with other mitigation strategies. In New York City, for instance, Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced that patrons at an array of indoor establishments would be required to prove that they’d been vaccinated against COVID-19. New York City was, by all appearances, the first major U.S. city to implement such a policy. Vaccines remain widely available in the United States — the Biden administration’s efforts to get more Americans vaccinated have no doubt assisted with getting the economy back on track.
