Jobs Return to Peak, but Quality Lags (Video)
(Wall Street Journal / Worthy News)– The U.S. finally clawed back all the jobs lost since the recession hit in late 2007, a watershed in a slow recovery that finds a labor market still in many ways weaker now than before the downturn.
U.S. payrolls in May hit an all-time high after the first four-month stretch of job creation above 200,000 since the boom days of the late 1990s, according to the Labor Department’s latest employment report. In all, employers added 217,000 jobs last month, nudging payrolls above the prior peak in January 2008. The jobless rate, obtained from a separate survey of households, remained at 6.3%, the lowest level since September 2008.
The U.S. has 1.6 million fewer manufacturing jobs than when the recession began, but 941,000 more jobs in the accommodation and food-service sector. More than 40% of the jobs added in just the past year have come in generally lower-paying fields such as food service, retail and temporary help.