I'll take any good news any time, especially in 2020. Jobs and growth of employment in November when much of the country began experiencing the most COVID cases to date was better in Florida. If we’ve learned anything as a country, it should be that lockdowns aren’t effective at stopping anything other than our economy. While Governor DeSantis clearly gets it in Florida, that’s not true everywhere, in New York city where they shut down their schools, facts and logic won out and they’re open again. As Americans we’re nothing if not resilient given the opportunity to be and that continues to show up in the jobs report.
The ADP private sector jobs report is the first view of what happened in November. The number of jobs added wasn’t huge but the breadth of the gains against the context rising COVID cases is impressive. According to the ADP Report, there were 307,000 private sector jobs added in November. That included over 110,000 for small businesses, over 139,000 for midsized, and over 58,000 for large businesses.
That’s great news for two reasons. In a healthy recovery smaller business are adding more jobs than larger companies. During the earliest months of the recovery large companies were adding almost all the jobs while small businesses were still shedding them in many cases. Small businesses are the tip of the spear in our economy. They’re the first to hire when there’s demand and they’re the first to lay off people when times are tough. Given the brutal year it’s been for small businesses, it’s extremely encouraging to see three straight months of smaller businesses leading the way in the job's recovery.
Now, that also includes gains across every sector led by leisure and Hospitality, education and health, and lastly, professional and business services. On another positive note, there were 8,000 manufacturing jobs added along with 22,000 construction jobs. Those are also leading indicators about real-time demand. On Friday we’ll get the full picture with government jobs added in.
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