Wis, US had big job losses and May recoveries. Both have a long road back

We got a look today to see if Wisconsin joined in the restoration of jobs that the U.S. had in May. And much like the country as a whole, we got a decent bounce-back after the big losses in the previous two months.

• Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's labor force participation rate in May was 66.6, nearly 6 percentage points higher than the national rate of 60.8 percent. Wisconsin's unemployment rate in May was 12.0 percent, 1.3 percentage points lower than the national rate of 13.3 percent.

• Place of Work Data: Wisconsin added 74,900 total non-farm jobs and 72,100 private-sector jobs from April 2020 to May 2020. From May 2019 to May 2020, Wisconsin total non-farm and private-sector jobs declined by 387,700 and 338,100 respectively.

As that last sentence hints at, we are still in a major hole compared to where we were last year, just like America still was after May’s gains. If you look at the rate of losses, both the US and Wisconsin had still lost more than 1 out of every 8 jobs that existed in February.

Interestingly, Wisconsin has lost a higher percentage of jobs than the US overall, but a smaller percentage of private sector jobs.

The biggest sector of job losses has taken place in Leisure and Hospitality - basically hotels, bars, restaurants and various types of live entertainment. That sector still was significantly down in mid-May, reflecting that many types of those businesses had yet to open by that time.

This was especially true in Wisconsin, whose largest cities were still under Safer at Home restrictions at the time of the May jobs survey, and we had suffered disproportionate losses in the Leisure and Hospitality sector in April. As of the May survey, we had still lost nearly 48% of the state’s jobs in the sector.

As for the household survey that determines the unemployment rate, you can see that Wisconsin was slightly delayed in having its unemployment pile up. We dropped down like everyone else in April and recovered some in May, but have slightly outpaced the country with a lower unemployment rate, and Wisconsin has a higher rate of the working-age population having jobs.

While there still seems to be a lot of assumption in financial circles that May will be the start of a vigorous recovery that gets us near to where we were over the next few months, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. For example, at the end of May, we still had more than 30 million Americans filing unemployment claims between the three main programs.

And sure, jobs have come back over the last month as more of the economy reopens. But it's still being offset more than 2 million new unemployment claims a week getting filed, an amount that is three times more than any week we had during the Great Recession.

At the state level, having 15% of claims still being undetermined is unacceptably large. But let’s also note that while we are finally declining from the absurd numbers of April, we are still seeing as much (if not more) new claims being filed in Wisconsin than any time during the Great Recession, when Springtime totals of new claims peaked at just over 27,000 claims.

And in 2009, we didn't have nearly the barriers and extra oversight that we have in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.

With all of the happy talk about jobs coming back, I think we’ve gotten numbed to the scope of just how many people have been laid off, and we ignore that at our peril. We’re still at the highest unemployment levels that this country has had in the last 80 years, and if we level off from a recovery rate of 2.5 million-a-month, we will be left with a jobs hole that would be as bad as what we had at the depths of the Great Recession.

That’s a place few likely thought we would be in as 2020 started. If we were told 6 months ago that even 9 million jobs were lost and unemployment of 8% developed over the first half of this year, I think we would have expected to be stunned and called it a disastrous economy. And it's much worse than that today. It’s the fact that COVID-19 led to the declines that allows some people to ignore the awful state of the jobs market in both Wisconsin and America.

But if we still see double-digit unemployment and 8% of our jobs still gone in 4 months, I think we’ll be feeling differently about the economic situation, and be a lot more angry.