Over the past year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a gut-punch to the labor market in every state in the union. The statistics are stark: in April 2020, the unemployment rate in the United States soared to 14.8%. According to the Congressional Research Service, that’s the highest rate since data collection began in 1948.
Pandemic-related unemployment has had disparate impacts on different demographic groups. Americans who were white, college-educated and male were statistically less likely to lose their jobs than were young people, women, people of color, and folks without college degrees.
On the other hand, some of the essential industries that stayed open throughout the pandemic relied on a labor pool that was likely to be less educated and less white. In meat packing plants, for example, essential workers were put at great risk, particularly in the first months of the pandemic when PPE was scarce. We now know that some 60,000 workers in those packing plants contracted COVID-19, and more than 300 died – another demonstration that the inequities in our society can have lethal consequences.
The Biden administration, only five months in, has been contending with these issues head-on. On the campaign trail last year, Biden put forward a robust plan for getting Americans back to work. But once he was sworn into office, Biden knew that he had to ensure that it would be safe to go back to work in the first place, so he prioritized the comprehensive rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the
country. As of this writing, more than 51 percent of Americans who are eligible for the vaccine have been fully vaccinated, and the New York Times reports that current trends indicate that 70% of the adult population in the U.S. will be vaccinated by this summer.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael’s monthly column examines the history of key government agencies and how they are “Building Back Better” under the Biden Administration
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