The rate of unemployment in the United States it remained at 3.6% in April -the same figure registered in March and the lowest since the start of the pandemic-, a month in which there were 5.9 million unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, in English).
In the fourth month of the year, moreover, the creation of job it was robust with 428,000 more jobs, and the sectors where employment increased the most were leisure and hospitality, industry, and transport and logistics.
The figures for April confirm the good moment that the US labor market is experiencing, with a unemployment very low and many opportunities for those seeking jobwhich in turn has led to a large number of workers abandoning their jobs to access others with higher pay and better conditions.
The competition between companies to obtain employees in the midst of this labor shortage and the consequent rise in wages is one of the factors that is contributing to the high inflation that the United States is experiencing, of 8.5% in March.
In this sense, workers’ hourly wages rose an average of 10 cents to $31.85 last month and have increased by a total of 5.5% in one year.
In April, the labor market participation rate, that is, the proportion of people of working age who have a job or are actively looking for it, it stood at 62.2%, about the same as in March and still down from 63.3% in February 2020, before the pandemic.
The figures of unemployment They continue to show, as usual in the US, large differences between racial groups, and while for whites it stands at 3.2%; for blacks it is 5.9% and for Hispanics it is 4.1%.
