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Marty Walsh has been one of the Biden administration’s most reliable economic analysts to emerge from the Labor Department, the White House, Davos and even the Covid isolation during his two years as labor secretary.
Friday is the deadline to file the agency’s February jobs report, which is scheduled to be released. He’s set to go after making important progress but with plenty of “work” to do – as Walsh himself often says – on two key knee fronts.
After 26 Yahoo Finance games in recent years, Walsh is scheduled to join him Friday morning for one final chat before becoming executive director of the NHL Players Association.
This is what came up again and again over the hours of back and forth.
A story based on entertainment and hospitality
The entertainment and hospitality sector — which includes many workers from artists to hotel clerks to restaurant waiters — came up dozens of times during the writer’s statement as the growing COVID-19 pandemic affects how Americans communicate and travel.
When the vaccines first started rolling out, Walsh’s tone was optimistic.
June 4, 2021 “For me, the disappointment today is the hospitality and restaurant numbers,” he said, “People are coming back to those areas.
But later that year, after a series of coronavirus waves, a sudden change came.
“That number is not where we want to be,” Walsh said six months later on Dec. 3, 2021, when the sector will have lost nearly 1.5 million payrolls from pre-pandemic levels.
In 15 months, the situation has improved, but the sector is still about half a million jobs lower than the pre-pandemic level and has a clear difference with the general labor market, which reached an unemployment rate of 3.4% in January. The lowest since 1969.
“That’s a sector that hasn’t completely recovered,” Walsh said in December. He also discussed more government involvement in workforce development and job training in the coming years because “many people who left the industry during COVID don’t want to go back.
We have to be very intentional when it comes to black Americans.
Another priority since Walsh took office has been the black unemployment rate as a key economic metric.
Since day one, Biden’s economic team has tried to focus on more detailed labor market metrics, such as black and Latino rates, as well as gender rates.
Walsh brought up the black unemployment rate in his first response to Yahoo Finance, which came less than two weeks after his Senate confirmation.
“The unemployment rate in black communities is over 9.6%, so we still have a lot of jobs here and that’s something to look forward to,” he said.
Two years later, this rate dropped to 5.4% in the January publication, an undeniable improvement. For Biden’s team, that’s very close to the 5.3% low achieved by then-President Trump in August 2019.
The 5.4 percent rate is “the second lowest since we started recording those numbers in the ’70s,” Walsh said in a recent briefing in February.
Another area where the administration has made some progress is the ratio between black and white unemployment. The administration wants to narrow the gap between the two rates—so often the unemployment rate for blacks is double that of their white counterparts.
In the past two years, the Biden administration has made a concerted effort to pass broad economic development goals, such as the Saving America Plan, the bipartisan Infrastructure Act and other bills such as regulators. .
The ratio was taken in February 2020, before the outbreak, when the black unemployment rate was 6.0%, compared to 3.0% among white Americans. The most recent reading in January 2023 found the white unemployment rate at 3.1% and the black rate at 5.4%.
Walsh in 2010 “We have to be very intentional about black Americans,” he said in an interview with Yahoo Financial Influencers in 2022, noting that unemployment rates for black Americans remain stubbornly high compared to other groups.
“If you dig deep into some of the jobs that black Americans have, they’re not high-paying jobs, so we have to come up with better ways,” he added.
His replacement looks set to take on that mantle. When President Biden announced that he had chosen Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Sue to replace Walsh, he first thanked the president and Walsh and then said, “To all the workers who toil in the shadows, workers who organize with power and respect in the workplace, know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will fight for you.”
Area of success: Manufacturing
Another constant from Walsh was around production. Both the overall labor market (by about a million jobs) and the manufacturing sector (by about 200,000 jobs) have surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
Walsh on September 3, 2021 “The president has put a lot of emphasis on what’s made in America.
Manufacturing quotes only increased as the administration helped shepherd the bill after the bill, but Congress is focused on stimulating that part of the economy.
“The president has worked with Congress on a lot of legislation, whether it’s the infrastructure bill, the deflation bill, the CHIPs bill, more manufacturing, more construction, more buildings, more opportunity for growth,” Walsh said in January.
Ben Vershkull is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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