The restaurant industry added 40,800 jobs in June and now employs 11,938,000 workers—a figure that’s climbed 27 percent since June 2020 yet remains roughly 700,000 below pre-COVID marks, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released last week.
Overall employment in “leisure and hospitality,” a category that tacked on 67,000 jobs in June, is down 1.3 million, or 7.8 percent, from February 2020. The country’s unemployment rate held at 3.6 percent for the fourth consecutive month and the number of unemployed people remained essentially unchanged at 5.9 million. Before the pandemic, those numbers were 3.5 percent and 5.7 million, respectively.
Hospitality unemployment rates came down, however, from 10.9 to 5.2 percent year-over-year. Wages in the leisure and hospitality sector grew 0.2 percent.
