The first week of September has brought us cooler temperatures, back to school mania, and this month’s #JobsReport. Let’s get into it.
The soft landing is still in sight! The economy added 142,000 jobs in August, and the overall unemployment rate remained steady at 4.2 percent. Unemployment rates ticked down for women overall (3.8 percent in July vs. 3.7 percent in August), Black men (6.6 percent vs. 5.9 percent) and Latinas (5.4 percent vs 5.0 percent), and held steady for Black women (5.5 percent in both months). Labor force participation ticked up for all three groups of women, meaning women are still seeing opportunities in the labor market.
However women only accounted for 38 percent of this month’s job gains overall. Some industries that women are overrepresented in, such as leisure and hospitality and health care, had strong job gains to the tune of about 77,000 jobs. But education overall gained only 4,700 jobs, with state education losing 3,200 jobs. This state education drop could be due to staff cuts at the post-secondary education level. The trend is especially worrisome as millions of teachers and support staff head back to classrooms across the country.
Many states are currently experiencing a teacher shortage compared to pre-pandemic levels.
One driver of this shortage is that teachers aren’t being paid what they’re worth. When compared to their peers, teachers face a wage gap that has been growing since the 1990s and stands at over 26 percent today. Flat wages for teachers have persisted across the past 40 years, despite numerous high profile teacher union strikes that have been successful in raising wages – and didn’t harm students.
The devaluation of the teaching profession and the additional COVID-era stress on teachers has led many to leave the classroom. This drop-off is particularly stark for elementary and middle school teachers and has led to 239,000 fewer primary and secondary school teachers in 2023 compared to 2019.
Most teachers are women, and women’s employment overall tends to increase in the fall. But this isn’t just because of teachers going back to the classroom.
As we talked about last Jobs Day, women perform the vast majority of unpaid care work including child care. School starting allows more women who paused work for child care responsibilities to reenter the workforce. Teachers’ working conditions are kids’ learning conditions. Their hard work as well as the economic activity that their labor facilitates, particularly for women, means their economic security is essential to our economy as a whole. It’s past time to give teachers a raise!
