Steady Work

The federal government released a dismal employment and unemployment report on May 8 reflecting the U.S. economy's free fall. Consider this scary statistic. Total private nonfarm employment fell from 105.7 million in March to 87.6 million in April. That's a loss of 18.1 million jobs. Not good!

From the good-producing sectors of the economy, 2 million jobs were lost. But from the service-producing sectors, 16.1 million jobs were lost, equal to nearly eighteen percent of all service jobs. Really not good!

In the leisure and hospitality sector, there were 14.3 million jobs in March but just 7.1 million jobs in April. In other words, about half of all leisure and hospitality jobs were gone in just a month.

Most sectors took a hit. Professional and business services, education and health services, manufacturing of durable goods, and construction all did very poorly.

One of the few exceptions was, you guessed it, utilities. There were 0.4 million utility jobs in March and that same amount in April.

Less than one in two hundred people employed by private companies in the U.S. work for utilities. But it's steady work in these unsteady times.