However, the most noted feature of the current recovery is that employment has been below par another so-called jobless recovery. Private payroll employment, and the workweek on net, continued to fall for two years from the trough of the recession in late 2001.
Private employment last month remained well below its level when the recession began, and only in May had it climbed above its level when the recession ended. This situation contrasts sharply with the beginning of most postwar recoveries (although, as I will discuss later, not with the one in the early 1990s), when employment surged.