Jobs Friday: Rise Of The Self Employed
It is Jobs Friday!!!! This month, the U.S. economy added 559,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent. This is a lot better than last month's job report, but considering the devastating effect of Covid on the U.S. economy last year, it's far from where we want to be.
If the pandemic hadn't happened, we would have likely 10 million more people working jobs right now than we do, so we were hoping for a summer of 1 million jobs added each month. As COVID cases come down and vaccinations go up, we've seen consumer spending and restaurant dining activity pick up, but somehow employment has not quite kept up with those positive trends.
We're not quite ready to bring back the Jobs Friday air horn, but there are some very striking pieces of data within this jobs report that point to some interesting new trends in the jobs market. On The Indicator from Planet Money, we chat about the rise of self employment.
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