Spring Letdown: Hiring Slows in April, Raising New Challenges For Economy
at 5:37 am NPR
Hiring unexpectedly slowed last month, as businesses struggled to keep pace with booming demand from newly-vaccinated customers.
Updated May 7, 2021 at 8:49 AM ET
U.S. employers added just 266,000 jobs in April, according to a monthly snapshot from the Labor Department. It was the weakest month of job growth since January.
The unemployment rate rose to 6.1%, from 6% in March, partly because hundreds of thousands of people joined the work force.
The labor market is still far from fully recovered. Even with last month s gains, there are still 8.2 million fewer workers on payrolls than there were before the pandemic. Job gains for March were also revised down, from 916,000 to 770,000.