Employment by Industry in March

The U.S. lost a net 701,000 jobs in March as the economy struggled with the coronavirus, and the labor situation is expected to be much worse in April. The brunt of March’s employment decline was felt by service industries. In the coming months, manufacturing and construction jobs will suffer more as well.

Table 1 breaks total employment down into service and goods-producing industries and then into private and government employees, based on data from an interim report from the Bureau of Labor Statistic for the first half of March. Most of the goods-producing employees work in manufacturing and construction; the components of these two sectors of most relevance to steel people are broken out in Table 1. Note, the subcomponents of both manufacturing and construction shown in Table 1 don’t add up to the total because we have only included those with the most relevance to the steel industry.