The U.S. labour market is both hot and cold
On September 16, local time, Amazon, one of the world's largest Internet online retailers, held a virtual job fair, offering 33,000 technical jobs at home. It is said that the society has responded very enthusiastically to the virtual job fair. Amazon has received resumes from more than 250,000 job seekers and the number of job seekers is still increasing.
Since March of this year, the epidemic has raged in the United States, and the unemployment rate in the US job market has increased significantly. During the worst period of the epidemic in April, the unemployment rate in the United States was as high as 14.7%. The US Department of Labor reported on September 17 that 860,000 employees applied for unemployment benefits last week, and the unemployment rate was 8.6%, which was lower than 10% for the first time since April. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate is still significantly higher than the pre-pandemic level. Prior to February, the US unemployment rate was 3.5%, a half-century low. According to data from the Department of Labor, the United States lost more than 22 million jobs at the height of the epidemic.
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Institute for Economic Policy Research, a US think tank, said that the report on job vacancies and labor mobility released on September 9 showed that the overall recruitment rate of US companies has slowed sharply. "The job market has entered the second stage of recovery, and the speed is slowing down in a frustrating manner." said Lydia Boussour, a senior American economic analyst at the Oxford Institute for Economic Research in New York. "One more of the two laid-off workers. Still unemployed, Congress is unable to pass much-needed financial assistance, which will slow down employment growth and become more unstable, posing a major risk to the economy."
Since the beginning of the epidemic, Amazon has been recruiting on a large scale. As of June 30, in the three months, Amazon has employed 36,400 employees, and the total number of employees in the company currently reaches 876,800, a year-on-year increase of 34%. Amazon’s vice president of workforce development, Ardine Williams (Ardine Williams) said, “We know that, regardless of whether it is related to COVID-19, millions of people now need professional help.” Amazon said that the average of these technical jobs With an annual salary of $150,000, it will support Amazon's cloud computing, Alexa and Prime Video teams.
Like Amazon, technology giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all showed great resilience during the epidemic. In recent months, these companies have successively expanded their employees, and their market value has increased by billions of dollars.
Judging from the analysis of new jobs by CareerBuilder and the Wall Street Journal, most of the company’s recruitment positions are targeted at technical personnel, including software engineers, data scientists, software designers, system engineers, Java developers, and network security experts. and many more. Among non-technical positions, only sales executives grew more.
It is reported that since the United States restarted the economy in May, about 10.7 million jobs have been restored, of which 1.37 million people were newly employed in August. However, it has still not been able to make up for the 22 million jobs lost in the epidemic.
Unlike the "high-flying" of technology companies, labor data in traditional industries is not optimistic. According to the layoff data previously released by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the reemployment service agency, US employers announced 115,762 layoffs in August. The total number of layoffs this year has reached a record 1.963 million. "The Information" survey shows that Uber, Lyft, Workday and other epidemics have been showing that they are shrinking manpower requirements.
Professional women became victims in the epidemic. McKinsey’s latest report shows that due to the new crown epidemic and its impact on the economy, the global female unemployment rate is 1.8 times that of men. The report found that women accounted for 54% of the jobs in the accommodation and food service industries, and 43% in the retail and wholesale industries. These traditional industries are particularly vulnerable to the epidemic, and unemployment is the most serious.
Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the job site Indeed, said, “Although the prospects for job seekers may not be as grim as some statistics show, the situation may worsen if the economic downturn continues. Every vacancy There are 2.5 unemployed people competing for positions. Since the beginning of 2014, there have not been so many unemployed people competing for a new job. The human resources market has reached 0.4! Demand for positions is severely in short supply.
With the advent of autumn, the unemployment rate in the United States fell from its peak double-digit growth to single digits. Among the main groups of workers, the unemployment rates of African Americans, Hispanics and Asians are extremely high, at 13%, 10.5%, and 10.7% respectively, and the female unemployment rate is 8.4%.