Employment by Industry: Jobs Advance in February

After dismal reports for the U.S. labor market in December and January, February saw positive gains in employment. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that employers added 379,000 to their payrolls in February, as vaccinations and business reopenings gave the economy a boost. Despite the added jobs this past month, the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.2%, compared to 6.3% the month prior, according to Steel Market Update’s latest analysis of the BLS data.

The net change in employed persons in February was a positive 379,000, a noticeable swing from the negative 447,000 in December, and negative 140,000 in January. Both the unemployment rate, at 6.2%, and the number of unemployed persons, at 10.0 million, changed little in February. Although both measures are much lower than their April 2020 highs of 14.7% when the number of unemployed persons skyrocketed to 23.1 million, they remain well above their pre-pandemic levels in February 2020 at 3.5% and 5.7 million, respectively. Due to the pandemic fallout, the baseline against which future comparisons will be made is February 2020, the all-time high for nonfarm employment at 152,463,000. Figure 1 shows the total number of people employed in the nonfarm economy.