Inside the November ADP Report
Bottom Line: I’ll distract your attention away from the Presidential election to bring you an economic related update. Specifically, jobs. Once we’ve reached a point of clarity and a personal sense of resolution with the election cycle, the reality of our daily lives will once again become paramount. That takes us back to the economy and the effort to bring back pandemic induced job losses as quickly as possible. This year has felt like equal parts never ending but also as though it’s all happened so quickly. I guess a pandemic does that to a society. While much of the country, along with the rest of the world, is struggling with the virus once again, its been six months since the first reopening's from the lockdowns began. We’ve made a lot of ground up but we also have a ways to go to get back to record low unemployment rates we were enjoying prior to the pandemic. The ADP private sector jobs report is the first view of what happened in October. It was once again progress.
According to the ADP Report there were 365,000 private sector jobs added in August. That included...
- Small businesses: +114,000
- Midsized: +135,000
- Large: +116,000
While the total number of jobs added wasn’t a grand slam, the breadth of the progress was. What we want to see is the majority of jobs being added by small and mid-sized companies. That’s a sign of a meaningfully improving economy as the smallest businesses are those most economically sensitive. It’s also 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 quite literally profited off of the losses of small businesses, had dominated job growth.
For an added dose of good news, every sector participated in the recovery in October. This included the largest number of jobs being added in the hardest hit sector – leisure and hospitality, followed by education and health care and professional and business services. 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.