Tue | Sep 23, 2025

Job market recovers but appears weaker

Published:Sunday | June 8, 2014 | 12:00 AM
Auto workers assemble the body of a 2010 Ford F-150, at the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Pickups are an economic indicator because contractors buy these flatbed trucks to haul everything from tools to landscaping equipment to lumber to build homes, the stuff that's the lifeblood of a healthy economy. -File

WASHINGTON (AP):The United States economy has finally regained the jobs lost to the Great Recession. But go easy on the hallelujahs. The comeback is far from complete.

Last Friday's report from the government revealed an economy healing yet marked by deep and lasting scars. The downturn that began 61/2 years ago accelerated wrenching changes that have left many Americans feeling worse off than they did the last time the economy had roughly the same number of jobs it does now.

Employers added 217,000 workers in May, more than enough to surpass the 138.4 million jobs that existed when the recession began in December 2007. But even as the unemployment rate has slipped to 6.3 per cent from 10 per cent at the depth of the recession, the economy still lacks its former firepower.

PAINFUL TRANSFORMATION

To many economists, the job figures are both proof of the sustained recovery and evidence of a painful transformation in how Americans earn a living.

"The lobar market recovery has been disappointing," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services. "Even with the new peak, there is still a great deal of slack."

"There are still 1.49 million construction jobs missing. Factories have 1.65 million fewer workers. Many of these jobs have been permanently replaced by new technologies: robots, software and advanced equipment that speeds productivity and requires less manpower," said Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research for the advisory and consulting firm CohnReznick.

"When heavy things need to be moved, we now have machines to do it," O'Keefe said. "It is unlikely in the manufacturing sector that we recover much of the losses."

Government payrolls have shrunk, taking middle-class pay with them. Local school districts have 255,400 fewer employees. The US Postal Service has shed 194,700 employees.

And during the economic recovery, more people have left the job market than entered it. Just 58.9 per cent of working-age Americans have jobs, down from 62.7 per cent at the start of the recession.

Some of that decline comes from an ageing country in which more people are retiring. But the share of working adults among the overall population is "still bouncing around at the bottom where it was during the worst of the recession" — evidence that meaningful wage gains across the economy are unlikely, O'Keefe said.