A “now hiring” sign is posted in the window of a restaurant in Los Angeles, California on January 28, 2022.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images
The latest nonfarm payroll report shows a labor market nearing a recovery to pre-pandemic levels, but small business owners across the U.S. say that finding and keeping qualified employees remains one of their biggest challenges.
February job growth posting its biggest monthly gain since July, with nonfarm payrolls for the month rising by 678,000 and the unemployment rate at 3.8%, its lowest level since before the pandemic, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
Across 2021, 6.665 million jobs were added in the U.S., a figure noted by President Joe Biden in this week’s State of the Union address as the largest single-year gain in American history. With the bounce back, the job market is about one million (1.14 million) employed workers short of where it was pre-pandemic, but there is still a large gap in filling open positions, which stood at over 10 million at the end of last year.
Main Street is one area where this labor struggle remains. In February, companies with 500 or more workers added 552,000 positions, according to ADP’s private payrolls report from earlier this week. That was responsible for almost all of the job gains tracked by ADP, while companies with fewer than 50 employees recorded a loss of 96,000 employees during the month.
Fifty-two percent of all small business owners said that...
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