Thursday, January 7, 2021

JOE BIDEN - HIGH TECH OWNS ME! - THEY NEED FLOODS OF FOREIGN WORKERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED - BUT IN AMERICA, LEGALS ARE LAST IN LINE FOR JOBS EVERYWHERE

 

“These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency,” he adds. “Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.”


H-1B Foreign Workers Begin Lobbying Joe Biden to End Trump’s Reforms

joe biden
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
3:18

Foreign workers in the United States on the H-1B visa are thrilled about President-elect Joe Biden’s coming into office, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as they hope President Donald Trump’s reforms to the program will be thrown out.

Last year, Trump implemented a series of reforms to the H-1B visa program — which often replaces American workers with imported foreign workers in white-collar U.S. jobs — that requires the visas to be allotted based on employers offering the highest salaries and mandates federal agencies review if the program is outsourcing U.S. jobs.

Attorneys representing H-1B foreign visa workers told Quartz that their clients are excited for a Biden presidency as they hope he will throw out the reforms:

H-1B applicants are hopeful that an administration led by Biden and Kamala Harris will take a gentler and less haphazard approach.

“All of our clients are now breathing a tremendous sigh of relief as it can only get better moving forward knowing that Biden-Harris are pro-immigration,” said New York-based immigration lawyer Neil A Weinrib.

“Under the current administration, H-1B denials and requests for evidence (RFEs) skyrocketed, making it difficult for employers to hire foreign workers,” said Richard Burke, CEO at immigration firm Envoy Global. “H-1B hopefuls and employers alike are looking for a decrease in RFEs under a president-elect Biden administration.”

In November, huge majorities of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California said they fully expect Biden to end Trump’s reforms and increase the number of foreign workers that multinational corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft can import at the expense of qualified Americans.

About 74 percent said they believe Biden will end Trump’s executive orders protecting U.S. jobs for American workers while 64 percent said Biden will increase white-collar U.S. job outsourcing. Another 66 percent said Biden will “loosen restrictions” on immigration to make it easier for corporations to outsource to foreign workers.

Quickly after the 2020 presidential election, the business lobby began asking Biden to end Trump’s reforms to the H-1B visa program in the hopes they can maximize profits by outsourcing labor.

There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.

Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Nominee Formerly Advised Big Tech, Wall Street

AP Photo/Fernando Vergara
AP Photo/Fernando Vergara
2:29

President-Elect Joe Biden’s nominee to head the State Department, Antony Blinken, formerly advised the nation’s largest tech conglomerates and Wall Street firms, financial disclosure reports find.

Blinken, while at WestEx Advisors, which he co-founded, advised clients such as Big Tech corporations like Facebook, Uber, and LinkedIn, as well as Wall Street firms such as Blackstone, Bank of America, Lazard, and McKinsey & Company.

Also, Blinken advised corporations like Gilead, Boeing, and AT&T, Politico reports:

The disclosures cracked open WestExec’s closely held client list, which the firm had previously refused to divulge. WestExec has paid Blinken nearly $1.2 million over the past two years, according to the filing, with another estimated $250,000 to $500,000 owed for his work this year. [Emphasis added]

Blinken has entered into a term sheet to sell his stake in WestExec, which is valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, according to the disclosure. He also plans to divest his stake in WestExec Ventures, a sister venture capital firm, according to the filing. His stake in WestExec Ventures is valued at between $1 million and $5 million. [Emphasis added]

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has criticized Biden’s “corporate revolving door” of Washington, D.C., insiders and executives with close ties to big business and special interests.

“This is not just a revolving door of private industry, but it’s a revolving door of just the same people for the last 10, 20, 30 years … [there is] just an extreme disdain for this moneyed, political establishment that just rules Washington, D.C. no matter who you seem to elect.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has previously said of Biden’s transition team.

As Breitbart News has reported, Wall Street employees and Big Tech insiders have joined Biden’s transition team as his presidential campaign raked in tens of millions from multinational corporations and big banks over the course of the last year.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


2020’s Big Winners: Billionaires, Silicon Valley Tech Lords, and Communist China

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos provides the keynote address at the Air Force Association's Annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Oxen Hill, MD, on September 19, 2018. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 23: …
Jim Watson, Chip Somodevilla, Nicolas Asfouri/Getty Images
17:26

The coronavirus pandemic took nearly two million lives worldwide and caused unprecedented economic devastation this year, but 2020 had at least three big winners who came out stronger in spite of – or perhaps because of – the pandemic: the world’s billionaires, Silicon Valley’s tech lords, and communist China, where the virus originated.

COMMUNIST CHINA

China’s communist regime is sounding increasingly triumphalist in the wake of the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and could have been prevented by Beijing. China’s communist dictator Xi Jinping boasted in his New Year’s Eve address that China is “the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth” in 2020, while the rest of the world’s economy shrank.

“China’s economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it was at the beginning of this year,” Axios reports. “By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020.”

Much of this is due to China’s dominance of global manufacturing; and with the whole world still reeling from the pandemic, China is moving to solidify its monopoly on the world’s supply chains through expanded free trade agreements, including a new agreement with the European Union. The pandemic’s economic damage has also allowed China to buy influence in the Third World through its international infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government has criticized as imperialist colonization via a predatory debt scheme.

As Breitbart’s Frances Martel reported:

The Chinese communist state documented a record-high trade surplus in November. Exports around the world increased 21.1 percent over November 2019 despite widespread reports that Beijing is relying heavily on enslaving its ethnic minority Uyghur population to keep production costs low. Dozens of international companies — including big names like Apple, Nintendo, and Nike — have been implicated in the use of Uyghur slave labor, some believed to be based in concentration camps.

Those not outright enslaved may also be vulnerable to forced labor, particularly in the cotton-picking industry. Offered few other options, many Uyghurs work in the cotton industry, sometimes becoming involved without clear consent, researcher Adrian Zenz revealed last month.

Much of the increase in exports for China has been the product of the pandemic causing other countries to limit their manufacturing sectors, and most economic activity in general. China’s imports from outside also declined, given the limited economic activity around the world, resulting in a staggering $460 billion trade surplus with the rest of the world in November.

The Center for Economics and Business Research, a U.K. think tank, predicted this month that, in part because of the pandemic, China was on a speedier path to becoming the world’s largest economy than it had ever been, and may overtake the United States by 2028.

The key to China’s economic resilience lies in its manufacturing sector, which bounced back faster from the pandemic, as did the U.S. manufacturing sector. For example, the U.S. automotive industry was among the first industries to get back to work after the initial lockdown because it could set up clear safety protocols to keep factories Covid-free by keeping factory workers six feet apart, distributing protective gear, setting up cleaning stations, and alternating work shifts to deep clean the plant and limit any exposure from Covid outbreaks.

However, after years of bad free trade agreements and offshoring of labor, the U.S. economy is much more reliant on its service sector, which is why it was much less resilient to the pandemic. Even before the government mandated lockdown, consumers changed their habits out of fear of contracting the virus. Jobs in the travel, food, leisure, and entertainment industries were especially vulnerable because “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another,” the Associated Press reports. And even if every lockdown order was lifted, the elderly population – who comprise a signification percentage of American consumers – will still likely curtail their leisure and traveling habits until the virus is no longer a threat to them.

All of this was born out in an October report from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, which revealed that the U.S. manufacturing sector “held up much better and recovered much more quickly than the services sector,” as Breitbart’s John Carney reported. Overall, the pandemic hit the U.S. nonmanufacturing sector twice as hard as the manufacturing sector, all of which confirms the importance of having a vibrant manufacturing base. Meanwhile, China is increasing its investment in new manufacturing facilities and infrastructure, while the Unites States’ Congress has still failed to propose or pass any major infrastructure legislation that will put the U.S. on a path to compete with China in developing and building the technologies of the future on our shores.

To top off this victorious year for Beijing, the communist regime now has an ally in the Oval Office with Joe Biden emerging as the victor in this year’s presidential race. Not only does the president-elect have family members with close business ties with the communist regime, Biden has also repeatedly declared that he doesn’t see China as “competition” to the U.S. Furthermore, Biden has plans to impose a penalty tax on U.S. corporations that move business overseas. In theory, the proposal is to hurt companies for offshoring their manufacturing. But in practice, this policy aligns perfectly with the interests of communist China because companies can bypass Biden’s tax penalty by simply outsourcing their offshore manufacturing to foreign partners in China; so instead of making the parts themselves, these companies can simply buy from a third-party foreign manufacturer, which companies like Apple already do. Thus, the billionaire class, which favored Biden in the 2020 election, will have little to fear from Biden’s offshore tax threat, and China will be delighted by it.

2020 may well be remembered as the first year of the new Cold War with China; and like the last Cold War, there is now a space race, as China ends the year having planted its flag on the moon where the American flag was planted over 50 years ago. However, it remains to be seen whether the United States will emerge victorious against this new communist menace, which has already taken millions of American jobs and hundreds of thousands of American lives, all while tormenting its own citizens, who have been imprisonedsurveilleddisappeared, and used as slave labor by an authoritarian regime enriched by 20 years of record trade imbalances acquired through flagrant trade violations.

The greatest generation defeated its “evil empire.” Will the Covid-generation, which came of age during the great pandemic, defeat the new evil empire in the decades to come?

THE WORLD’S BILLIONAIRES

Never was the old cliché that “the rich get richer” truer than in 2020. The wealth of the world’s super-rich broke new records this year, according to a report conducted by PwC and the Swiss bank UBC. The combined wealth of the world’s over 6,000 billionaires grew to $10.2 trillion in July, blowing past the previous record of $8.9 trillion in 2017. And the number of new billionaires also grew from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 in 2020. All of this happened at the height of the pandemic between April and July 2020, as average people the world over were hit by economic devastation, but the world’s billionaires increased their wealth by over a quarter to 27.5 percent, the Guardian reports.

In 2020, America’s 614 billionaires increased their collective net worth by $931 billion, even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. Between just March and May alone, the net wealth of these American billionaires increased by 15 percent, as over 36 million Americans were joblessness due to the pandemic. In contrast, the U.S. poverty rate rose to 11.7 percent in November, a jump of 2.4 percent since June, marking the highest single year increase since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago.

On a worldwide level, the pandemic has caused global extreme poverty to rise for the first time in over 20 years, according to a World Bank report in October. The report estimates that the pandemic will “push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021.” They define “extreme poverty” as living on less than $1.90 a day, and about 82 percent of this “new poor” population will be in middle-income countries.

However, 2020 was a banner year for the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, whose wealth grew by nearly 80 percent during the pandemic from $113 billion in March 2020 to $203.1 billion in October 2020, as the lockdowns made everyone increasingly dependent on his Amazon services to deliver food and supplies. Amazon’s 2020 third-quarter profits tripled from what they were last year, from $2.1 billion in 2019 to $6.3 billion in 2020.

That is in stark contrast to the estimated one in five small businesses that closed during the pandemic. In May, the Washington Post reported that over 100,000 U.S. small businesses – once the economic engine of the American dream – closed forever due to the virus. The pandemic devastated mom-and-pop businesses that were forced to shut down due to government lockdown orders that favored large retail chains like Walmart. These big box stores were allowed to remain open and rake in huge profits, increasing their monopoly power and driving out smaller competitors for good. This year Walmart increased its profits by nearly 45 percent over last year, thanks to the pandemic. The net wealth of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s heirs — Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton – each increased by nearly a quarter during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the workers fueling this massive wealth increase for the billionaire owners of Amazon and Walmart gained little from this boom. Amazon workers received an extra 95 cents an hour and Walmart workers received 63 cents an hour as compensation over the course of the pandemic, while during that same period, Bezos’ income increased by $70 billion and the Walton family’s fortune increased by $45 billion, according to a Brookings Institute report. But there is little recourse for these workers to complain about that disparity. The companies, which combined employ nearly 3 million Americans, have been ruthless in suppressing attempts by their workforce to unionize and collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.

However, these same American billionaires and their global corporations have been very vocal in support of woke political causes like the Black Lives Matter movement, promising millions of dollars to repair the damage caused by slavery in America over 150 years ago, even as these same corporations have little qualms about exploiting slave labor today in China.

The pandemic has intensified this already troubling income disparity. America today increasingly resembles an oligarchy, where the concentration of power into the hands of a small cadre of the super-rich and their monopolistic mega-corporations allow these elites to buy political influence and stomp on the rights of everyone else. Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that America’s founders would have rightly feared that this “economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.”

Indeed, as Greenwald writes, the “combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative ‘COVID relief,’ and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.” None of this reflects free market capitalism, but rather crony capitalism, whereby “the power of the state [is used] to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.”

Meanwhile, the year ends with a Republican Senate’s refusal to grant American citizens $2,000 direct relief payments, opting instead to “target” relief to the favored few. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell referred to direct payments to all Americans as “socialism for rich people,” even though actual billionaires are benefitting the most from the “relief” Congress targets their way. As Congress debates “socialism,” nearly 12 million Americans owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities, and an estimated 5.4 million Americans lost their employer health insurance in a three-month span this year due to the pandemic, which is more than the loss of coverage in any single year.

SILICON VALLEY’S TECH LORDS

Of all the monopolistic billionaires blessed by the pandemic, perhaps none have come out as victorious as the tech lords of Silicon Valley. Not only did they increase their massive wealth and monopoly power during the pandemic, they also helped get their preferred candidate elected to the White House.

As has been well-documented, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (whose net wealth increased by over 85 percent this year) deliberately censored stories about Hunter Biden’s corruption scandal in the lead up to the November election, and Google (whose 2020 third-quarter revenue increased by 14 percent year-over-year) suppressed the Google search visibility of Breitbart News articles by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016.

Greenwald notes that the “most menacing” aspect of all of the pandemic-fueled increase of wealth and monopoly power is that its primary beneficiaries have been Facebook, Google, and Amazon – companies with “unprecedented power” over “the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.”

He writes:

Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.

That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship.

Greenwald calls Facebook’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden stories “one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years,” noting that “this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.”

“These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency,” he adds. “Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.”

Indeed, in 2020, the rich got richer, Silicon Valley got more powerful, and communist China reaped the benefits of the death and chaos that emerged from its shores. The rest of us, to quote the poet, are “turning and turning in the widening gyre” hoping that the centre will hold.

Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour

New weekly jobless claims at 797,000 amid signs of US economic slowdown

New first-time claims for unemployment benefits remained at historically high levels last week following the passage by Congress of a temporary $300 weekly addition to state jobless benefits and an absurdly inadequate one-time $600 stimulus payment.

There were 787,000 new claims for unemployment benefits for the week ending January 2, only a slight drop from the previous week and still an extremely high number by previous standards. It demonstrates the continuing hardship and suffering for millions of American workers as hospitals are overcrowded with COVID cases and the pandemic death toll rises.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary’s Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Only a few states have started distributing the additional $300 unemployment payments, while others, such as Ohio, say they are waiting for additional “guidance.” The supplement will only last for 11 weeks, ending in March, long before the COVID-19 pandemic will be contained.

The number of continuing claims for unemployment assistance fell 125,000 to 5.1 million last week. And there was also a decline in the number receiving extended unemployment benefits. However, the drop was likely related to the lapsing of the previous federal unemployment extension on December 26.

For a similar reason new applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) fell as well to around 160,000 from 310,000 the previous week. The program provides assistance to those not normally covered by regular unemployment benefits such as self-employed and independent contractors. It followed a nearly week-long lapse in benefits as Trump and Congress engaged in parliamentary theatrics. As a result there was evident confusion among potential claimants over whether or not they were eligible.

The result was a further blow at millions of workers already behind on rent and other critical payments. A number of states, such as Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wyoming, did not report any new claim data for the PUA program at all during the week ending January 2.

A US Labor Department report due out Friday is expected to show the unemployment rate increased to 6.8 percent after months of declines. However that number is itself a gross understatement. It does not include workers employed part time who want full time work and doesn’t include “discouraged workers” who have dropped out of the labor market altogether. According to Thomas Barkin, president of the Richmond Federal Reserve, some 4 million workers employed before the pandemic have left the labor force. If those were counted, the actual unemployment rate would be 9.5 percent.

The biggest employment declines in December were in businesses such as restaurants, hotels and retail stores that depend on face-to-face interaction with customers. These businesses are not likely to recover until after the pandemic ends.

Since March, when the pandemic forced widespread lockdowns, new weekly unemployment claims have been running at historically unprecedented levels. Over 73 million new claims for benefits have been filed during this period. The threat of eviction looms for millions, while 50 million face food insecurity.

The hunger crisis is being exacerbated by a global rise in food prices, which have gone up 18 percent since May even as incomes decline. Federal data analyzed by Northwestern University found that overall food insecurity has doubled, and child food insecurity has tripled during the pandemic. Nationwide, seven percent of families reported receiving free food in the previous week.

Regardless, the stock market surge continued on Thursday despite record deaths due to COVID and the storming of the US Capitol by fascist supporters of President Donald Trump. Tech stocks climbed to record highs led by electric vehicle maker Tesla, which was up five percent. Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, is now the richest man in the world based on his company’s stock rise, with a net worth of $187 billion, edging out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Tesla’s huge stock valuation is largely based on speculation, given that the carmaker delivered less than 500,000 vehicles in 2020.

After months of increased hiring the US economy is showing signs of a slowdown. The private payroll processor ADP reported that the private sector cut 123,000 jobs in December. It was the first monthly decline since April 2020. Consumer spending also declined in November for the first time in seven months as well as household income. According to JP Morgan Chase credit card and debit card purchases were down 6 percent in December from last year compared to down two percent year on year in October.

Some states reported a significant spike in new unemployment claims. New filings in Michigan rose to near 29,033, up from 19,818 the prior week. Due to cuts enacted by the state legislature those filing after January 1 will only be eligible for 20 weeks of unemployment benefits, not 26 as previously was the case. Another 6,000 in Michigan filed for PUA benefits the week ending January 2 and 304,080 Michigan workers remained on PUA benefits through December 19.

A number of other states showed increases of more than 10,000 new unemployment claims, including Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Virginia and Texas.

In spite of unprecedented economic hardship, California is suspending unemployment payments on 1.4 million claims due to allegations of fraud. This comes at a time when the state has failed to process and pay out benefits. There were a reported 777,760 unemployment claims in California for the week ending December 30. That was a 32,124 increase over the previous week’s total.

According to a report in the Guardian, nearly every US state has failed to meet federal standards that require getting unemployment benefits to claimants within three weeks. It cites the horror story of Eugene Williams of Daytona Beach, Florida, who lost his job with a food distributor near the start of the pandemic. He received benefits up until June when he accidentally entered “return to work” while verifying his claim.

He has not been able to reactivate his benefits since that time and has suffered severe deprivation as a result. “I’m sleeping in my car and in the next few weeks I’ll be without a phone,” said Williams. He has been unable to find new employment and has had to rely on charities for food assistance. “It is impossible to get a hold of the unemployment department. ... all I’m hearing is ‘be patient.’ Isn’t 31 weeks patient enough?”

The increasing economic desperation of millions of workers stands in sharp contrast to the enrichment of the financial oligarchy, who have been the recipients of trillions of dollars in federal handouts. This is a symptom of a deeply unjust and dysfunctional capitalist system that prioritizes private profit over human need. The answer is socialism, the control of production by the working class, the producers, on a rational and planned basis in the interest of the common good. 

U.S. Economy Lost 140,000 Jobs in December, Unemployment Unchanged at 6.7%

TOPSHOT - US President-elect Joe Biden speaks at the Queen Theater on January 6, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware. - Biden on Wednesday denounced the storming of the US Capitol as an "insurrection" and demanded President Donald Trump go on television to call an end to the violent "siege." (Photo by …
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
4:45

The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.7 percent, according to data released Friday.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast an addition of 50,000 jobs and a slight rise in the unemployment rate to 6.8 percent.

“The decline in payroll employment reflects the recent increase in coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and efforts to contain the pandemic,” the Labor Department said.

Uncertainty about control of the Senate—and, to a lesser extent, the outcome of President Donald Trump’s attempts to continue to contest the presidential election—may also have weighed on the labor market in December. Studies have shown that policy uncertainty can discourage business spending, particularly in less competitive markets. It’s likely that the shutdowns and pandemic have made many areas of the economy less competitive over the past year.

Private sector jobs fell by 95,000 in December. The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.5 percent and the total number of unemployed held steady at 10.7 million, about twice the number of unemployed persons before the pandemic.

Manufacturing added 38,000, far more than expected. Throughout the pandemic, the manufacturing sector has shown a high level of resiliency, a vindication of President Trump’s policy focus on strengthening this part of the economy. Still, the sector now employs over a half-million fewer workers than it did prior to the pandemic.

Construction added 51,000 in December, boosted by the boom in housing that has accompanied the lockdowns and rise in shootings and killings in many U.S. cities.  Employment in specialty residential contractors and residential construction is one of the few sectors of the economy that employ more workers than before the pandemic.

The biggest jobs losses came in leisure and hospitality, where employment declined by 498,000, with three-quarters of the decrease in bars and restaurants. Employment in the amusements, gambling, and recreation industry fell by 92,000 and dropped in the accommodation industry by 24,000. Since February, employment in leisure and hospitality is down by 3.9 million, or 23.2 percent.

Employment in private education decreased by 63,000 in December. Employment in the industry is down by 450,000 since February.

Government employment fell by 45,000 in December thanks to a decline in local and state government employment. Federal government employment grew by 6,000. Outside of education, local government employment fell by 32,000.  State government education lost 20,000 jobs. Since February, total government employment overall is down by 1.3 million.

The economy has added around 12.2 million jobs in the past eight months, a record-breaking pace after the unprecedented collapse in employment as lockdowns took hold in March and April. The increase in the ranks of employed workers shows that companies ramped up hiring as the economy reopened and consumers came back to stores, restaurants, and other businesses that had been shuttered this spring. Despite the gains, total employment in December was lower than its February level, highlighting just how deep the pandemic cut into what had been the strongest jobs markets in decades.

Hiring slowed in November and layoffs picked back up as infections, hospitalizations, and deaths surged. Many state and local governments around the country announced new restrictions on business, travel, dining, and other activities that have once again suppressed demand and discouraged growth in employment. Some businesses that held on through the first wave of shutdowns have not been able to stay in business in the second wave and much of the government aid made available earlier last year was no longer offered in December.

And even throughout the reopening layoffs have been extremely elevated, indicating that the pandemic’s effects are still ravaging the economy. A separate report on Thursday showed that 787,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the prior week and 790,000 in the week before that.  Jobless claims can be volatile week to week so many economists prefer to look at the four-week average. This rose to 818,750, a decrease of 18,750 from the previous week’s upwardly revised level.