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  • 2021-03-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Most Jobs Added in February 2021 'Waiters and Bartenders'? (en)
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  • In March 2021, new employment figures showed that the U.S. economy added 379,000 jobs in February, the first full month of Joe Biden's presidency. The news was greeted with cautious optimism, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the gains had set up a stronger recovery for the spring of 2021, and The Washington Post reporting that the figures had surpassed analysts' estimates. Politico wrote that: On social media, other observers — in particular those more broadly opposed to Biden — sought to undercut the significance of the jobs figures, claiming that a large majority of the increased employment came in one sector, namely food and beverage services. On Twitter, the libertarian economics blog Zerohedge wrote: The stockbroker and financial commentator Peter Schiff tweeted: The right-wing British blog Guido Fawkes tweeted: Those figures were accurately stated, although waiters and bartenders was a reductive description of the occupations in question. As a result, we're issuing a rating of Mostly True. The standard measure of job growth is total nonfarm payroll employment, seasonally adjusted, a metric that is collated and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), each month. On March 5, the BLS published figures for the preceding month, February 2021, writing that: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 379,000 in February... In effect, this means that there were 379,000 more jobs in the United States in February than there were in January. The BLS provides in-depth breakdowns of job gains or losses, and unemployment, including details on the demographic and sectoral contours of each month's data. According to the same set of figures, the leisure and hospitality sector gained 355,000 of the 379,000 total new jobs in February (Summary Table B). Of those, 285,900 jobs were specifically in food services and drinking places (Table B-1). That's the source of the 286K figure presented by Zerohedge. Those 285,900 jobs made up 75.4% of the total number of new jobs added in February, the percentage figure provided by Schiff in his tweet. However, the food services and drinking places subsector is made up of more than just waiters and bartenders. The following is how that subsector is defined in the official North American Industry Classification System: The BLS figures for February 2021 don't specify the proportion of those 285,900 jobs composed of specific occupations, but it's highly unlikely they were all waiters and bartenders. In 2019, the most recent year for which figures are available, the following was the breakdown of occupations within the food services and drinking places subsector: As can be seen from those figures, waiters and waitresses made up less than one-third of workers within that subsector. If the distribution of occupations was even broadly similar among the 285,900 new food services and drinking places jobs added in February, then it would appear highly unlikely that even a majority of those 285,900 new jobs were made up of waiters and bartenders alone. (en)
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