Stunning May jobs report proves we must reopen everything now
by Tiana Lowe
| June 05, 2020 09:20 AM
Just a month after posting the worst unemployment rate in recorded history, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the unemployment rate actually decreased by 1.4 points in May in a stunning jobs report that superseded all expectations. As models predicted that we wouldn't see any GDP or employment rebound until the third quarter of the year, economists predicted that the unemployment rate would skyrocket from 14.7% to nearly 20% in May.
Instead, thanks to a partial economic re-opening, the economic predictions were all wrong. With a sharp increase in the leisure and hospitality, construction, education, health, and retail sectors, the nation recreated 2.5 million jobs. The clearest and explicit cause of the increase, as detailed by the report, is the re-openings.
But as the BLS makes clear, time is of the essence.
Those who were jobless for five weeks or fewer decreased from a whopping 10.4 million to 3.9 million people. But those who were jobless from five to 14 weeks, presumably those blue collar workers laid off in the first waves of the shutdown, increased by seven million people to 14.8 million.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/stunning-may-jobs-report-proves-we-must-reopen-everything-now
