Job creation in the US suffered a slowdown in November due to the combined effect of congestion in the supply chain and the rebound in coronavirus cases, due to the delta variant. The US job market added just 210,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than half of the 550,000 expected by analysts. A further setback for the Administration of President Joe Biden, which is under the added pressure of the new omicron variant.

However, the behavior of the labor market sent bittersweet signals in November, when the unemployment rate fell four tenths compared to the previous month and stood at 4.2%, the first time that it was below that registered in March 2020 when the pandemic started. In August, it was 5.2%. The New York Stock Exchange opened higher this Friday after a very volatile week, following the monthly employment report.

“Employment has increased by 18.5 million jobs since April 2020,” when the first wave of the pandemic paralyzed economic activity, but is still 3.9 million jobs below its February 2020 level , just before the pandemic, the report states.

The data shows the drastic slowdown since October, when 546,000 jobs were created. Analysts expected the autumn growth trend to consolidate in November, following the impact of the delta variant on the labor market in summer (the consequences were especially noticeable in August, when only 235,000 jobs were added). Some sectors have recorded job destruction, such as textile retail (18,000 fewer jobs) and car sales (10,000), the Labor report indicates.

However, the conjunction of the virus, rampant in recent weeks; the supply chain crisis and bottlenecks appear to have delayed companies’ growth plans and, by extension, clouded the recovery.

The number of unemployed Americans fell by 542,000 in November. Approximately 6.9 million people were still out of work at the end of data collection, in the middle of last month, before the appearance of the omicron variant, which has clouded the recovery forecasts. The market has yet to recover almost four million jobs.

In anticipation of the publication of the data, the White House had congratulated itself this Thursday on the good course of employment, “thanks to the rescue plan [pandémico] and the intense vaccination strategy ”. According to the statement, the country is experiencing “a broad-based and almost unprecedented labor market recovery,” which has allowed it to return to full employment “two years ahead of schedule.” The statement affects the recovery in metropolitan areas, 99% of which have an unemployment rate lower than that registered a year ago. “The unemployment rate is now below 3% in more than one in four metropolitan areas nationwide,” the statement said. This is not the case in New York, which in recent months has been registering twice the unemployment rate than the national average despite the reopening of economic activity.

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