Macroblog

As has been widely reported, the March employment report shed light on the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. labor market. One telling number is the official unemployment rate, which tallies the share of the labor force made up of people out of work (but who are looking for a job) plus those who have been laid off and expect to be recalled. The official unemployment rate increased from 3.5 percent in February to 4.4 percent in March. My own preferred measure is the share of the working-age population who are unemployed, working part-time because of economic conditions, or outside the labor force but still want to work. This underutilization rate is featured in the Atlanta Fed's Labor Report First Look analysis of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) labor report. The First Look shows that this measure increased from 5.8 percent in February to 7.1 percent in March.

According to the BLS, people who did not work "because of the coronavirus" were supposed to also be classified as unemployed (on temporary layoff). However, relative to February, it appears that around 1 million more people were classified as employed but absent from work and not getting paid for "other reasons" (reasons other than illness, childcare problems, bad weather, being in school, etc.). If those people were instead counted as unemployed, then the unemployment rate in March would have been closer to 5.0 percent, and the underutilization rate would have been 7.5 percent. The data in the table below break down the various components of these measures, if you want to perform your own calculations.

Note: Data represent thousands of people and are seasonally adjusted except for unpaid absence. People in the "Want a job" category include those who currently want a job but are not counted as unemployed. The "Don't want a job" category includes people not in the labor force who say they don't currently want a job (see here for more details). "Unpaid absence" includes those who have a job but are on an unpaid absence from work for an unspecified reason.

Source: BLS, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Center for the Advancement of Data and Research in Economics, and author's calculations

A few observations about the absence-from-work data for March. First, a marked increase in absence from work across occupations took place, in both paid and unpaid absences. However, being paid while absent from work for "other reasons" was disproportionately prevalent among professional occupations, likely reflecting those workers' relatively greater ability to continue to work remotely. Second, unpaid absence from work was disproportionately common among food-preparation and building-maintenance occupations, as well as jobs providing personal services—the types of occupations most directly affected by social distancing mandates.

The April BLS labor report (due on May 8) will provide a clearer picture of the depth and breadth of the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market, and it will be important to include unpaid absences from work in the analysis. In the meantime, I'm keeping a close eye on the weekly unemployment insurance claims data as well as other high-frequency surveys (such as this one from Gallup).

By John Robertson, a senior policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's Research Department