US suffers biggest job losses in history amid coronavirus

WASHINGTON: The damage inflicted on the United States economy by coronavirus lockdown measures came into sharp focus with government figures showing a record 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs in April.

Data from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) also showed the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.7 percent last month – the highest since the Great Depression.

With shops and factories closed nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all of the jobs created in the US economy in the last decade were wiped out in a single month.

An unprecedented 20.5 million jobs were destroyed in April in the world’s largest economy, the biggest amount ever recorded, the Labour Department said in a report released to capture the impact of a full month of the lockdowns.

The economic damage from the lockdowns to contain the virus has been swift and stunning, despite nearly $3 trillion in financial aid approved by Congress, and there is growing fear that the temporary layoffs will become permanent since some companies won’t survive.

Taken together, 21.4 million jobs were destroyed in March and April, nearly equal to the 23 million positions created during the economy’s long expansion from February 2010 to February 2020.

All major industry sectors felt the pain. Leisure and hospitality was the first sector hit and the one bearing the brunt of the impact of the lockdowns, shedding 7.7 million jobs, while manufacturing eliminated 1.3 million positions. Those two sectors alone added up to more than the 8.6 million total jobs lost in the two years of the global financial crisis.

The Labour Department noted the unemployment rate would have been closer to 20 percent, but some workers were misclassified as employed when they actually had been laid off because of COVID-19.

The pandemic has caused many employees to leave the workforce altogether, while others have been forced from full-time jobs into part-time work. The measure of the labour force as a share of the total population sunk to 51.3 percent, its lowest in history, meaning nearly half of working-age Americans are not employed.

Minorities were hit particularly hard: African American unemployment spiked to 16.7 percent from 6.7 percent in March, while the rate for Hispanics was 18.9 percent, more than triple last month.

President Donald Trump said on Friday the numbers were expected to rise and promised to bring them back, proclaiming that even the Democrats are not blaming him for the job losses.