Employment by Industry in August

Employment in manufacturing and construction is recovering much more slowly than in the overall economy. The net change in employed persons was negative 20.8 million in April. Each month since then has had positive growth, but the recovery slowed in July and August.

We have created a new summary chart for August to track the overall economy to a greater degree than in the past. Table 1 breaks total employment down into the major sectors. These account for 71.5 percent of all employed people in the U.S. The baseline against which future comparisons will be made is February 2020, the all-time high for nonfarm employment. As the situation unfolds, we will begin to see green shoots appear in Table 1 and will be able to compare the recovery of manufacturing and construction to other major sectors. The situation through August is that the leisure and hospitality industries have suffered by far the greatest decline and that other sectors are remarkably similar, all having single-digit declines since February. Manufacturing and construction have had almost exactly the same decline.