Labor Secretary Marty Walsh highlighted the bright spots of a new monthly jobs report on Friday, telling reporters that in the months to come, "we’re going to start to see more and more people get back into the economy.”

What You Need To Know

  • The United States economy added 559,000 jobs in May, about twice the number added in April

  • The unemployment rate fell to 5.8% in May, falling 0.3% from the month before -- showing that the U.S. still has a long way to go to recover from the levels of employment experienced prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

  • Labor Department Secretary Marty Walsh on Friday sought to underscore that economic recovery would be a long game

  • “We can't just flip a switch and get everyone back to work tomorrow,” Walsh said

His remarks come on the heels of a newly-released jobs report released Friday morning, which showed that the U.S. added 559,000 jobs in May, more than doubling gains from the previous month, even as the number of employed Americans continues to hover far below pre-pandemic levels.

Unemployment fell to 5.8 percent in May, down from 6.1 percent in April, according to the Labor Department report. And the number of persons seeking unemployment benefits has also fallen for the past five straight weeks, down to its lowest level since the start of the pandemic.

Walsh also sought to underscore the “bright spots” of the report in an interview with Spectrum News' Eva McKend, including job gains in the areas of leisure, hospitality, education and health care. This uptick largely reflects the easing of restrictions in many states, as well as the resumption of in-person learning, and an eagerness by many Americans to begin traveling again.

Restaurants and bars added 186,000 jobs, the health care industry added 46,000 jobs, manufacturing added 23,000 jobs, transportation and warehousing added another 23,000 jobs. Construction jobs fell by 20,000 and retail jobs dipped slightly, losing 6,000 jobs.

But following a lackluster April jobs report, the modest May numbers offered a stark reminder that the U.S. still has a long road ahead as it attempts to return to pre-pandemic levels  levels of employment.  

“We can't just flip a switch and get everyone back to work tomorrow,” Walsh told CNN Friday. “Over the course of the next few months we're going to see the jobs filled.”

Walsh underscored the need for the American Jobs Plan, President Biden’s sweeping infrastructure proposal, as a means of getting Americans back to work. “The American Jobs plan is really an investment in infrastructure and clean drinking water and broadband access – a lot of inequities that we've seen across this country,” he told Spectrum News, later referring to it as a "forward-looking plan for the next decade."

“It’s about creating more opportunities for people to get into the workforce," Walsh added.

Asked whether it was incumbent on private companies to provide better pay and more attractive benefits to bring more people back into the workforce, Walsh told Spectrum News that the May job numbers underscore the fact that private companies are willing to provide better pay and are “creating opportunities for Americans to earn a better living.

“I think that’s an important aspect here,” Walsh said. “We need to make sure we’re sharing the wealth across the country.

“This pandemic has obviously shined a light on inequities” across the country, he continued. “I can talk to you about a 5.8 percent [unemployment rate], which is great, but if you look in the Black community, it's 9.1 percent, in the Latino community it's 7.3 percent. So there's still a lot of inequity, and we have to continue to not just get people back to work, but get them to better paying jobs.”

While the U.S. still has 8.2 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic, employers are eager for employees to return to work. Job postings in May were nearly 27 percent above pre-pandemic levels, according to the employment website Indeed – the highest level on record since 2000.

Nearly half of small business owners, or 48%, surveyed by the National Federation of Independent Business last month said they were struggling to fill slots – which some Republicans have blamed on enhanced federal employment benefits. Twenty-five GOP-led states have since announced plans to withdraw from federally-funded programs, in hopes this will incentivize jobless Americans in their states to return to work.

Still, economists agree it is almost certainly more complicated than that: The cost of childcare, or fears of contracting the coronavirus, could pose a deterrent to many who would otherwise return to full-time work.

 “It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride from here till September,” Rubeela Farooqi, the top U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, told The New York Times.

“Is there a labor shortage?” he continued, “In my mind, absolutely not. There is a ramping-up effect, and that is going to persist for a little bit. You have to expect some frictions.”