Employment at U.S. companies plummeted in April by the most in records back to 2002, according to numbers fro the ADP Research Institute release today.. The report reflects data through April 12 in order to align with the report from the Labor Department for April, set to be released on Friday. Therefore while the report is labeled April, it doesn’t include the job losses from the coronavirus recession in the second half of the month.
The Labor Department’s April jobs report on Friday is projected to show a record 21 million decline in total nonfarm payrolls and a jobless rate surging to 16%.
The U.S. economy has never taken this big a hit this quickly. “The total number of job losses for the month of April alone was more than double the total jobs lost during the Great Recession,” Ahu Yildirmaz, co-head of the ADP Research Institute, said in a statement.
The damage was spread throughout the economy.
Bloomberg summarized the report this way: The ADP report showed service-provider employment declined 16 million, while payrolls at goods producers decreased more than 4.2 million. Employment within trade industries, which include retailers, dropped 3.4 million. Professional and business service employment fell almost 1.2 million. Within the goods-producing sector, construction payrolls slumped by nearly 2.5 million and factory employment dropped almost 1.7 million.
Large businesses cut nearly 9 million jobs, while small employers–those with fewer than 50 employees–reduced employment by 6 million jobs. Mid-sized businesses shed 5.3 million workers. Franchise employment dropped by nearly 1.1 million in April, according to ADP.
Before April, the worst monthly decline in the ADP data was 835,000 jobs lost in February 2009, during the depths of the last recession.
