2 charts show what kind of jobs came back big in July - and where recovery is a long way off

Outdoor dining — Waiter wearing PPE during Covid-19 pandemic serving food to diners wearing masks.
halbergman/Getty Images

Nonfarm payroll gains in July were higher than estimates, adding 943,000 jobs.
At the industry level, restaurants and hotels continued their large monthly gains.
These charts look at monthly employment changes from June to July as well as from before the pandemic.
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There were a lot of bright spots in the latest jobs report, including another month of a more than 300,000 gain in the restaurants and hotels space.

The economy added 943,000 jobs in July, higher than the median estimate of 870,000, Leisure and hospitality led the way, adding 380,000 jobs from June 2021 to July 2021. Most of this gain comes from bars and restaurants, which added 253,200 jobs last month.

The following chart shows just how many jobs were added and lost in each of the major industries:

Government jobs also saw a large gain last month, in part because of gains of 220,700 in local education jobs. However, it is important to note that the large gains in education jobs could be due to seasonal adjustments, because the typical hiring-and-firing patterns for schools were hugely disrupted by Covid.

"The gain in payrolls, however, was boosted by the seasonal adjustment, which expected larger layoffs at the end of the school year," Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor, wrote in a blog post. "Many of those layoffs were pulled forward earlier in the pandemic or simply didn't occur as education workforces were slimmer during the last school year."

Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed, told Insider that the jobs report is good news about the economy's still incomplete recovery. "It's wonderful, frankly, to see that the pace of progress was picking up through mid-July, but we still have a ways to go." He noted the potential for the recent increase in Covid cases in the US to slow the pace of job gains in coming months, but "it seems unlikely that it will have the same economic or labor market impact as the initial wave did."

A reshaped economy begins to emerge

Recovery to pre-pandemic employment hasn't been equal across industries. Despite the large gains in leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants and hotels, that's also an industry where working from home is harder, if not impossible.

As Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, pointed out on Twitter, industries considered low work-from-home were 4.8% below February 2020 employment after the July report. In particular, the leisure and hospitality industry still has 1.7 million fewer jobs than in February 2020, down by 10.3%.

On the other hand, high work-from-home industries, like tech, are only 0.6% below pre-pandemic employment.

Taking a closer look at where industries are at now and where they were in February 2020 right before the pandemic shows that some industries are still not close to recovery.

The following chart takes a look at the industries that make up the major industries and how far they are below pre-pandemic employment from February 2020. The chart also includes each industry's median hourly wage as of May 2020 from BLS's National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates program.

Motion picture and sound recording industries within information stand out as one detailed industry that's still far below pre-pandemic level, at 30.2%.

"It could be that, yes, there's this cyclical aspect that as people can start to return to the movie theaters, there'll be stronger employment gains there and get closer to pre-pandemic levels," Bunker said. "There's also the question of, have we seen longer-term structural change in this industry?" He noted that structural changes include movies being released through streaming services in addition to at movie theaters, so possibly less of a need for workers in this industry.

He added that we won't be able to tell to what extent it is cyclical or structural changes until the pandemic is finally over.

Overall, the July jobs report had many positives - but they speak more to the pace of recovery than to what the post-pandemic economy will actually look like. That remains to be seen.

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