The Industries Hit Hardest By The Unemployment Crisis
Published May 15, 2020
by Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight
Jobs in the leisure and hospitality supersector of the American economy — which includes museums and historical sites — have been hit hard in this crisis.
NOAM GALAI / GETTY IMAGES
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that 2.98 million more Americans had filed for unemployment insurance in the previous week, bringing the total for claims since March 8 up to 36.8 million. Last week’s jobs report for the month of April estimated the national unemployment rate at 14.7 percent, and Thursday’s report implies that perhaps another 2.5 percent of the labor force has filed for benefits since the beginning of May.1
It’s a grim situation, though not every area has been hit equally hard. So which parts of the economy have seen the most damage? Using data from the most recent jobs report, I dug into changes in total nonfarm employment by sector from February — the last full month before the coronavirus-triggered economic crisis truly began — to April, starting at the ”supersector” level, or the most broadly grouped parts of the economy: