How many jobs did businesses add in September? Inside the ADP Report
Bottom Line: It’s hard to imagine that it’s been nearly seven months since lockdowns began across the country. It has. It’s also weird that it’s been five months since reopening's started as well. Time has been something that has felt entirely different than usual during the pandemic. Time is also something many businesses have been running out of as they’ve attempted to hold on during the virus induced recession and arbitrary decisions regarding reopening's. Collectively what we hope for is continued progress despite the challenges. American free enterprise has always found a way and even while it hasn’t been truly free enterprise during these lockdowns, August still proved to be another month of progress for most businesses and the previously unemployed.
The ADP private sector jobs report is the first view of what happened in September. In a word...progress. Right now, we’ll take anything positive and that’s what we received.
According to the ADP Report there were 749,000 private sector jobs added in August. That included...
- Small businesses: +192,000
- Midsized: +259,000
- Large: +297,000
September was full of good news including the best showing by small businesses since the recovery began. That’s especially good news as they’ve been hardest hit and typically are responsible for around two-thirds of all jobs added in a healthy economy. In the earliest months of the recovery large businesses, which have quite literally profited off of the losses of small businesses, had dominated job growth. While they still led in growth – it's highly encouraging that the combination of small and mid-sized companies outpaced the largest companies. The other great news was the breadth and depth of the gains.
Literally every sector added jobs in September. This included the second highest gains coming in the manufacturing sector – with 130,000 jobs added. Toss in the 60,000 additional construction jobs and it’s a picture of a roaring recovery in the private sector. Clearly there’s a lot to feel good about here. Most importantly for those out of work, there’s lots of opportunity building back into our private sector. On Friday we’ll get the full picture with government jobs added in. More to come...