Since the COVID Event started, The US has had over 42M unemployment claims and lost 17.7 million jobs.

Both numbers are interesting to follow. Keep in mind that when a person goes back to work, the unemployment stops, but they are still tallied in a previous week’s unemployment Typically the unemployment claims and job losses/gains move in a tightly coupled manner. We do not expect to see that for a while.

In May we had 9.6M Unemployment claims and added 2.27M jobs back. While 2.27 sounds good, we are still down 17.7M jobs since February. Take the good news where you can.

Regardless, lets exam where some of these job losses are occurring. Below are the biggest job loss categories from the Department of Labor. This covers February through April:

Below are the industries that still experienced job losses between April and May:

Since the COVID Event starts, we had initial Huge job losses and not some gains. Here are the industries with the biggest job losses since February 2020.

Some observations:

  • Unemployment in IT and Software is at 3.7%. While higher than the 1.3% – 1.6% it has been over the last 24 months, this is still a strong number.
  • The 3.7% unemployment rate for the IT and Software market is the lowest of any market segment the BLS reports on.
  • Food Prep and Service has the highest unemployment rate of any market – 36.5%
  • There are 455,000 more people working in IT and software in May 2020 than in May 2019 (5,763,000 vs 5,308,000)
  • construction jobs shrank by 732,000. 77% of those jobs have come back. This is the biggest bounce back ranking by percentage.
  • Hospital and Nursing care workers are still the hardest hit among healthcare workers. A big percentage of the hospital jobs lost are in rural hospitals.
  • Repair and Maintenance jobs have increased significantly while Manufacturing Fabricated Products and Machinery have still gone down. We are fixing more equipment than we are buying.
  • Four out of Five job categories with an unemployment rate under 5% require STEM training.

All the data in this article comes from the Department of Labor.