Inflation is surging and new coronavirus infections are spiking, but America’s employers are thought to have kept right on hiring in December on the strength of solid consumer spending.
All told, the number of jobs grew more than 4% in 2021 through November, the biggest gain since 1978, after a 6.2% plunge in jobs in 2020. So great was the pandemic-driven loss of employment, though, that even now, the economy remains nearly 4 million jobs shy of pre-pandemic levels.
Alaska Airlines said it's cutting 10% of its flights in January because of an “unprecedented” number of employees calling in sick. But because early studies have shown omicron variant appears less virulent than previous COVID-19 variants and few states or localities have moved to limit business operations, economists say they believe its economic impact will be short-lived.
Still, Andrew Hunter, an economist at Capital Economics, a forecasting firm, calculates that up to 5 million people — roughly 2% of America's workforce — could be stuck at home with COVID over the next week or so. Workers without sick leave who miss a paycheck are classified by the government as jobless. Any such trend could sharply lower job gains in the employment report for January, to be released next month.
The upward trajectory of new COVID cases will also likely weigh on jobs at restaurants and bars. The number of Americans willing to eat at restaurants started to slip in late December, according to the reservations website OpenTable. Restaurant traffic was nearly at pre-pandemic levels for much of November but had fallen nearly 25% below those levels by Dec. 30, based on a weekly average of OpenTable data.
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