(Reuters) – The final employment data sheet offered during President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday gave the Republican a cloak that no politician would envy: he will be the only modern president to leave the post with fewer seats working in the US than when he began his term.
A global pandemic that Trump – who lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden in November – was slow to acknowledge and was prone to downsizing or outright denial, much of its course, destroyed the U.S. economy in the last year of his term. He erased any appearance of the booming labor market, which he hoped to turn into a second term.
In contrast, the Department of Labor reported on Friday, the total number of jobs in the US fell in December by 140,000 to 142.6 million, about 10 million fewer jobs than before the coronavirus pandemic.
Economic records will count January’s employment figures in Trump’s column, since he left office near the end of January, on January 20th. This month’s data will be reported in early February.
But there is no realistic expectation that wages will return enough to close the gap of about 3 million jobs between December and January 2017, when Trump took office.
Chart: Trump labor market: Boom will collapse in a year,
Trump’s last year in office was punctuated by economic superlatives, effectively all caused by COVID-19 and the wave of restrictions on business and activity imposed to try to prevent its rapid and deadly spread.
The outbreak – which has now infected nearly 21.5 million US residents and killed more than 365,000 – triggered the fastest and deepest recession in the post-World War II era.
The unemployment rate has risen from a half-century low of 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in just two months as more than 22 million people have been laid off. Although it has dropped from 6.7% since then, it is 2 percentage points higher than it was when he was sworn in.
On this front, at least, Trump has company: he is the third consecutive Republican president to leave office with a higher unemployment rate than his inauguration. Both President George W. Bush and President George HW Bush have overseen rising unemployment rates during their tenure.
Chart: Trump Labor Market: Unemployment Rising,
In his first three years in office, Trump often pointed to improving the black labor market in keynote speeches, arguing that no other American president has done so much to improve the African-American crowd.
Some data confirm this. The black unemployment rate at the end of 2019 fell to 5.2% – the lowest since the Department of Labor began pursuing it. It was still 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. In contrast, job growth for whites was 3.3% – albeit from a much larger base.
But COVID-19 wiped out all of these gains, and while black employment levels have moved closer to where they were at the beginning of Trump’s term, levels for both blacks and whites remain below that. level.
Chart: Trump Labor Market: Black and White,
Trump came to the office promising a revival of production as part of his first American agenda, in which he spoke out against imported goods and companies that had sent factories abroad.
There has been some modest improvement in its first three years, with the total number of jobs in the manufacturing industry increasing by 3.8%. But other sectors – especially services – accounted for the majority of job gains so far.
And the services sector was the hardest hit by COVID-19.
Jobs in the leisure and hospitality industry, in particular, have suffered from measures to prevent the spread of the disease, and the latest rise in infections has revised the pain on the sector. While last month 140,000 jobs were lost in general, almost 500,000 were paid for free time in the leisure and hospitality industry, and the total number of jobs in the sector is 18.5% lower than when Trump took the oath of office.
And how about production? Today there are 60,000 fewer jobs in the factory than in January 2017.
Chart: Trump Labor Market: Large Variation by Sector,
Reporting by Dan Burns; Montage by Cynthia Osterman