Restaurants and theaters have increasingly gone dark amid staff shortages and renewed fears of infection. Many businesses have postponed return-to-office plans as cases have risen, sometimes indefinitely. Already facing challenges in hiring and retaining employees, they are now contending with a fresh swirl of questions. The latest climb on the pandemic roller coaster has made it difficult for businesses to plan. This week, she finally thought she’d have two servers and a bartender, only to find out that one of the employees was sick and awaiting the result of a Covid-19 test. Some of her staff members, who were students, left town early. When nearby Middlebury College went fully remote in December after detecting a spike in cases on campus, “business dropped off,” she said. She is worried that the latest pandemic surge will only make things harder. Boyce said hiring had been extraordinarily difficult in recent months, so much so that she had to take on bartending duties. “It’s really like a huge game of Ping-Pong,” said Danielle Boyce, the owner and general manager of an American Flatbread restaurant in Middlebury, Vt. Industries with face-to-face interactions, including restaurants, remain particularly vulnerable to case levels. “It might hit in early February as well.”
“I think Omicron will slow hiring in January,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at the payroll processing firm ADP, said before the report. But economists are bracing for the surge in cases to curtail job growth in January and in the coming months. There is widespread optimism that the Omicron surge will be short-lived and that the economy will then regain momentum. Since then, the Omicron variant has ignited a steep rise in coronavirus cases, driving up hospitalizations and keeping people home from work.
The report on Friday came with an important caveat: The data was collected in mid-December, before the pandemic’s latest wave revealed its strength. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, said on Twitter that December hiring was “another massive miss” and that the administration “has sabotaged what should’ve been a V-shaped recovery.”
The economic stimulus package that was passed last year was crucial, he said, declaring, “America is back to work.”īut Republicans cited the recent deceleration in hiring to flay Mr. Biden said at a White House news conference on Friday, noting that the one-year decline in the unemployment rate was the sharpest ever. “I think it’s a historic day for our economic recovery,” Mr. Despite the slowdown at the end of the year, an average of 537,000 jobs a month were added in 2021, and unemployment plummeted faster than just about anyone had forecast. The economy added more than 6.4 million jobs in total last year, the biggest annual gain on record, as it climbed out of the hole created by the pandemic. The December numbers cap a year defined by swings in a job market that remains entwined with the pandemic nearly two years on.Īnd they could prompt a split-screen on the state of the economy heading into a midterm election year that will determine the fate of President Biden’s agenda, as well as control of pivotal state governorships and legislatures.ĭemocrats are pointing to wage growth and overall job gains. Taken together, the data suggest that a dearth of available workers - and not a lack of demand - may be part of the reason hiring has languished.Įconomists said the report increased the chances that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates quickly to cool off the economy, since wage growth threatens to keep prices increasing as businesses try to cover their climbing labor costs. Wages continued to surge, rising 0.6 percent in December and 4.7 percent for the year, reflecting intense competition among employers for workers. The unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, from 4.2 percent. The gains were the smallest in a year that nonetheless produced record job growth.Īt the same time, there were signs that those looking for jobs last month were finding them. The economy added 199,000 jobs in December on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said Friday, down from 249,000 in November. Hiring slowed significantly at the end of last year, a stark indication that employers are struggling to fill positions even as the United States remains millions of jobs short of prepandemic levels.
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