COVID-Impact Questions Lose Relevancy, Dropped From Jobs Report

A COVID-19 vaccine is prepared in a file image. Stephen Zenner/Getty Images

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) household survey will retire questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic as they’ve been deemed “less relevant” considering the present circumstances when the disease is abating in the United States as well as in other parts of the world.

The pandemic-related questions were added to the survey in May 2020 during the initial stages of the pandemic when its effects, including lockdowns and restrictions, were widely felt throughout the world. “These questions had become less relevant than they were earlier in the pandemic. This Employment Situation news release is the last one to contain data from these questions,” said the BLS on Friday.

This means that the agency will no longer track “whether people teleworked or worked from home because of the pandemic, whether people were unable to work because their employers closed or lost business due to the pandemic, whether they were paid for that missed work, and whether the pandemic prevented job-seeking activities,” said the news release.

There will be four new questions added beginning October 2022 regarding remote work. The questions ask whether people teleworked during the survey; how many remote hours they worked; whether the survey participants worked remotely prior to the pandemic; and, whether they teleworked more, less, or about the same as before the pandemic.

The agency said that the new questions will take time to review and process, hence, the Household Survey Supplemental Data section of the Employment Situation news release will be temporarily discontinued with the release of October data on Nov. 4, 2022.

Unemployment, Remote Work Data

With the number of unemployed going down to 5.75 million in September, the unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent, returning to the level in July. It was 3.7 percent in August.

“Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for Hispanics decreased to 3.8 percent in September. The jobless rates for adult men (3.3 percent), adult women (3.1 percent), teenagers (11.4 percent), whites (3.1 percent), blacks (5.8 percent), and Asians (2.5 percent) showed little change over the month,” said the report.

The number of permanent job losers decreased by 173,000 to 1.2 million in September while those who are unemployed for 27 weeks or more (long-term unemployed) was little changed at 1.1 million. The long-term unemployed accounted for 18.5 percent of all unemployed persons.

The employment-population ratio was unchanged at 60.1 percent—1.1 percentage points below their values in February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the survey, 5.2 percent of employed persons worked from home in September, down from 6.5 percent in August. In May 2020, the figure was at 35.4 percent because of the pandemic-related restrictions.

In September, 1.4 million persons were unable to work following the closure of their workplaces due to the pandemic. “This measure is down from 1.9 million in the previous month and from 49.8 million in May 2020,” said the report.