America’s private employers in April added a paltry 266,000 jobs—a proxy for new hires—despite job openings at near record-high levels, suggesting businesses are struggling to find workers and reinforcing the view that some of the Biden administration’s fiscal relief measures are disincentivizing people from seeking work.
Some experts have suggested that government unemployment benefits may be partly to blame for labor market slack, or unmet demand for paid labor.
“Ongoing fiscal relief in the form of unemployment benefits could, in some cases, delay returns to the labor force and therefore delay reduction in labor market slack,” said Nick Reece, portfolio manager at Merk Investments LLC, in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times.
“In the depths of the emergency last year, there was a very compelling argument for government action,” he told The Epoch Times. But maintaining emergency measures “in non-emergency times may have unintended consequences,” he added.
“Incentivizing training skills and getting back to work would be better for our country than incentivizing indefinite unemployment, joblessness,” he said, while criticizing Biden’s proposed expansion of welfare programs for having no work requirements.
Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) commented on the jobs report in an interview on Newsmax, saying that many small business owners have told him that “we cannot get people to come to work.”
“The federal government has provided essentially a disincentive to want to find jobs, to want to work, and so that jobs report does not surprise me.”
He said that the extended unemployment benefits under the American Rescue Plan run through September, adding, “I think we’re going to see more of that, where people are going to say, ‘Look, I can make almost the same money by staying at home rather than going to work, why do I need to go to work?’”
Mark Fox, a Dublin native who lives in New York City, owns four restaurants in the Big Apple. While business is now finally starting to pick up, hiring troubles have slowed down the momentum.
“We are probably 60 employees short,” he said. “I have one restaurant in Greenwich Village that I haven’t reopened yet because they don’t have the manpower.”
The Ragtrader, a 300-seat restaurant in its fourth week of reopening, was hit hard last year. Fox said he lost a “devastating” amount of money. He said revenue levels currently are half of what he made in 2019 but that the needle is “moving in the right direction.”
“When it comes to recruiting workforce, in January, 7 percent of restaurant operators rated recruitment and retention of workforce as their top challenge; by April that number had risen to 57 percent,” Riehle told The Epoch Times.
“With fewer people in the workforce, the stimulus supports still in place, worker safety concerns, the need for caregivers to remain at home, and much greater competition with other industries for workers, operators are returning to pre-pandemic recruitment techniques for hiring,” Riehle said.
Some economists say employers will have to offer higher pay to draw more people back into the job market.
The U.S. economy remains more than 8 million jobs short of its pre-pandemic level.
