A surprising February jobs gain and drop in the unemployment rate is obscuring the long road to a full recovery from the coronavirus recession, economists say.
The U.S. added 379,000 jobs last month, more than double what analysts had expected, and saw the jobless rate drop to 6.2 percent, the lowest level since March 2020.
While the February employment report showed signs of an accelerating recovery, the job gains were just a drop in the bucket compared to the deep damage built up within the labor market over the past year. The deceptively low unemployment rate also ignores the millions of Americans who've been forced out of the labor force by COVID-19 and its disproportionate toll on women of color.
“The numbers are not debatable, they're not dubious, they're not confusing. It's clear. Millions of Americans have left the workforce and that is not good for our economy and definitely not good for continued growth of the economy,” said Michelle Holder, a labor economist at John Jay College in New York.
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