(Reuters) – The latest employment scorecard delivered during President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday handed the Republican a mantle that no politician would envy: he will be the only modern president to leave office with fewer U.S. jobs than when his tenure began.
A global pandemic that Trump – who lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Joe Biden in November – recognized too late and was liable to downplay or outright denial, devastated the U.S. economy in the final year of his tenure. . It erased all the appearance of the booming job market that he had hoped to lead him to a second term.
Instead, as the Labor Department reported Friday, total US employment fell by 140,000 to 142.6 million in December, about 10 million fewer jobs than before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The record economic books will count January’s employment figures in Trump’s column as he leaves office by the end of the month on January 20. This month’s data will be reported in early February.
But there is no realistic expectation that payroll will pick up enough to close the gap of about 3 million jobs between the December and January 2017 levels when Trump took office.
Image: Trump’s Job Market: Boom to Break Within a Year,
Trump’s last year in office was laced with economic superlatives, all of which were in fact caused by COVID-19 and the wave of restrictions on business and activities imposed to try to stem its rapid and deadly spread.
The outbreak – which now infected nearly 21.5 million US residents and claimed more than 365,000 lives – triggered the fastest and deepest recession of the post-World War II era.
The unemployment rate soared from a half-century low of 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in just two months, as more than 22 million people were put out of work. Although it has since fallen to 6.7%, it is 2 percentage points higher than when he was sworn in.
At least Trump has company in that regard: he is the third Republican president in a row to leave office with a higher unemployment rate than at his inauguration. Both President George W. Bush and President George HW Bush monitored rising unemployment rates during their tenure.
Image: Trump’s job market: unemployment is on the rise,
During his first three years in office, Trump often pointed in stump speeches to the improving labor market for blacks, claiming that no other US president had done so much to improve the plight of African Americans.
Some data confirms that. The black unemployment rate fell to 5.2% in late 2019 – the lowest since the labor department started tracking it. That was still nearly 2 points higher than the rate for whites.
By December 2019, employment for black people across the country had risen 8.1% from when Democrat Barack Obama – the first black president and Trump’s predecessor – left office. By contrast, job growth during that period was 3.3% for whites – albeit from a much larger base.
But COVID-19 has wiped out all those gains, and while black employment has moved closer to the start of Trump’s tenure, levels remain below that for both blacks and whites.
Image: Trump’s Job Market: Black and White,
Trump came to the office promising a manufacturing renaissance as part of his America-first agenda, including ranting against imported goods and companies that sent factories overseas.
In its first three years, there was a modest improvement, with total industry employment increasing by 3.8%. But other sectors – especially in the services sector – were responsible for most of the job gains until then.
And it was the service sector that dealt the hardest blow to COVID-19.
Leisure and hospitality jobs, in particular, have been hit by measures to prevent the spread of the disease, and the latest wave of infections has brought back pain in the sector. While 140,000 jobs were lost last month, nearly 500,000 jobs were lost in leisure and hospitality, and total employment in the industry is 18.5% lower than when Trump took the oath of office.
And what about the manufacturing? Today there are 60,000 fewer factory jobs than in January 2017.
Image: Trump’s job market: wide variations by sector,
Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Cynthia Osterman