Just as educators are being called on to start a mid-pandemic fall semester with both distanced learning and in-person instruction, the workforce expected to pull this off successfully is actually shrinking, due in all probability to the revenue shortfalls being experiences by states and localities. According to today's Department of Labor BLS release, "Government employment declined by 216,000 in September. Employment in local government education and state government education fell by 231,000 and 49,000, respectively...."
Over the last 12 months all government employment - including local education - is down by 847,000. By huge and extremely concerning contrast, it took until mid-2013 for state and local government job losses to hit around 800,000 in the Great Recession, according to EPI. Employment in private education decreased by 69,000 in September and employment in the industry is down by 355,000 since February, according to the BLS release.
So, as in the Great Recession, the failure of enough fiscal stimulus assistance to reach the state and local government sector - including especially the education sector - is a leading source of drag, causing the overall recovery to slow and creating the reverse square root recovery, instead of the V recovery we all need
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