Friday’s jobs report was the 48th and final monthly employment update of President Joe Biden’s presidential term, a tenure featuring significant improvement across the labor market which Biden touted as the “strongest” job growth in history, though a pandemic rebound and inflation at least somewhat muddied the rosiness of American workers’ prospects.
President Joe Biden addresses union workers in Philadelphia in 2023.
The total number of employed Americans grew from 142.5 million to 159.5 million from Dec. 2020 to last month, a 12% increase in nonfarm jobs.
And the unemployment rate decreased by 2.6 percentage points from 6.7% to 4.1% during Biden’s presidency, the best end-of-term jobless rate since the 3.9% unemployment at the end of Bill Clinton’s stint in the Oval Office.
Americans’ average hourly wages rose from $29.84 to $35.69 over the last four years, a 19.6% pay bump.
The labor force participation rate inched up from 61.5% to 62.5% over the last four years (the metric looks at the proportion of working-age Americans who are or want to be employed).
It’s indisputable that unemployment declined significantly and employment and pay both rose to record levels during Biden’s presidency. But when you factor out a global pandemic, the picture becomes less favorable. Unemployment is higher than the 3.5% jobless rate at the beginning of Trump’s final year, in February 2020, before covid lockdown orders ravaged the labor market. The total number of American workers in December 2024 is up only 5% from February 2020, far less than the headline 12% worker growth during Biden’s presidency. And the labor force participation rate is still well below its 63.3% level in February 2020, continuing a decades-long downward trend. “Covid is weird, and it makes comparisons weird,” Martha Gimbel, formerly a senior member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Politico last year.
The fruits of higher pay were offset by inflation. The government’s consumer price index increased by 20.8% from December 2020 through November, slightly outpacing the pace of pay increases.
Though presidents are often judged on the health of the labor market during their term, most experts agree they have less of an impact on the labor market and the economy than public perception may suggest. The labor market was a key issue on the campaign trail. Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump often presented distorted views of the health of the labor market, with the Democratic angle largely focusing solely on headline labor market growth and Trump mischaracterizing the gains solely as a pandemic rebound. Trump also falsely claimed the Biden-era job gains were driven “virtually 100%” by illegal immigration. The number of foreign-born workers grew by 20%, or 5.2 million, compared to native-born workers’ 5% growth, or 6.5 million, and the Labor Department does not survey immigration status.