The Labor Department released numbers as this week drew to a close on the rate of jobs getting added across the U.S. economy in February, and although the overall total — on a seasonally adjusted basis — fell slightly from the total seen in January, it was still higher than some expectations (and above December’s total!).
A full 311,000 jobs were recorded as added in February, per figures that specify it’s payroll employment outside of farms. An estimate from economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected a February total of 225,000.
An explanation from that federal department of some of the latest figures noted that a lot of the recent growth was seen in leisure and hospitality, an industry that remains below its level of employment seen prior to COVID-19 upending so much of the economy. “Employment in leisure and hospitality is below its pre-pandemic February 2020 level by 410,000, or 2.4 percent,” the Friday release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Still, it’ll be getting to that level sooner rather than later at the present pace of hiring, which saw over 100,000 jobs added in that industry last month. Another key locus of the job growth from February was in healthcare, the government added.
It’s a long list of economic signs in recent months that have shown reason for optimism, although the Federal Reserve has nonetheless forged ahead with increasing interest rates to try and address persistent inflation in part by tamping down demand. By a long shot, inflation has not been a problem somehow confined to the U.S., instead affecting economies throughout the G-20 group of nations worldwide. After some consistent drops in the inflation rate in the U.S., recent measures showed things instead plateauing, with the overall measurement of price increases from data in the Personal Consumption Expenditures index at the Commerce Department ticking up by a tenth of a percentage point in January from December. Those numbers specifically reflected the changes in general costs from the same month in the prior year.
Biden and others on his team have pushed forward with work to address some of the pressures on price. A recent CNN profile of Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary, cited what the outlet summarized as a “data sharing pilot program created in the wake of the 2021 supply chain crisis to integrate information between major retailers, trucking companies, shipping companies, ports and labor.” Back amid some of those major delays in supply chains for goods brought to the U.S., the Biden administration was also involved in talks about other fixes, like expanded work hours to get things moving at overwhelmed ports.
