Speaking at a community college in Cleveland, Ohio a year ago, US president Joe Biden heralded the dawn of a new kind of labour market recovery under his watch.
“My sole measure of economic success is how working families are doing, whether they have jobs that deliver dignity,” he said. “We want to get something economists call ‘full employment’. Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce . . . we want the companies to compete to attract workers.”
By many measures, Biden and his economic team have achieved that primary goal: the jobless rate has dropped to 3.5 per cent and employers have created more than 8mn new jobs in just 15 months, wiping away fears that the labour market could experience the same sort of sluggish recovery it suffered for years in the aftermath of the financial crisis.