WASHINGTON — America’s employers added 235,000 jobs in August, a surprisingly weak gain after two months of robust hiring.
The delta variant’s spread has discouraged some people from flying, shopping and eating out.
The unemployment rate dropped to 5.2% from 5.4% in July.
The August job gains the government reported Friday fell far short of the roughly 940,000 that employers had added in each of the previous two months, when widespread vaccinations allowed the economy to fully reopen from pandemic restrictions. Still, the number of job openings remains at record levels, and hiring is expected to stay solid in the coming months.
Many economists expect the hiring slowdown to be brief. They note that employers are still struggling to fill jobs to meet strengthened consumer demand and have posted a record-high number of openings.
A few months ago, many economists, along with officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House, had looked forward to September and the ensuing months as a period when the job market would return to a consistently strong state from the brief-but-deep pandemic recession.
With vaccinations spreading, their hope was that as fears of viral infections waned, more people would be eager to take jobs. Schools and child care centers would reopen, enabling more parents, particularly women, to start looking for work. And with a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement set to expire next week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and others speculated that more of the unemployed would look for work.
All those trends would help more businesses fill more positions and quell complaints from companies about chronic labor shortages.
Now, though, the spread of the virus’ delta variant has called some of those expectations into question. With COVID cases having spiked in July and August, Americans have been buying fewer plane tickets and reducing hotel stays. Restaurant dining, after having fully recovered in late June, has declined to about 10% below pre-pandemic levels.
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