Businesspeople in the U.S. have been complaining for more than a year about how hard it is to hire anybody. Their public-sector counterparts have had it worse, though, and it might not just be a pandemic thing.
To put it in numbers, nonfarm private-sector employment in the U.S. was 885,000 higher in August than before the pandemic in February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (That’s seasonally adjusted; without the adjustment it was 3.3 million higher.) Government employment was still down by 645,000.
This actually understates the private-public divergence. Last month, the BLS reported that its annual benchmarking of payroll jobs numbers against unemployment insurance tax records showed private-sector employment to be an estimated 571,000 higher than reported as of last March and government employment 109,000 lower. These numbers won’t be finalized and incorporated into the monthly jobs data until January, though, so just be aware that the government jobs declines are even bigger than shown in the charts here.As currently reported, the job losses have all been at state and local governments, with federal employment rising ever so slightly. (The short-lived government employment increase in the second half of 2020 apparent in the chart above was all about temporary federal census jobs.)
