Nine years of continuous growth in U.S. employment came to an extremely abrupt end in March when the coronavirus pandemic started to hammer the economy. Labor Department figures released Friday morning show that payrolls fell by an estimated 701,000 in March from the previous month. Bloomberg reports that those figures mainly cover the early part of March, before government-ordered shutdowns led firms to lay off millions more workers, so it’s likely a big underestimate of the number. The unemployment rate jumped to 4.4 percent from a half-century low of 3.5 percent, and is expected to surge more in the coming months.
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