GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A new report from the Center for Data and Analytics suggests that jobs are back to where they were pre-pandemic.
“It’s been a slow climb,” Paul Isley, an economic professor at Grand Valley State University, said.
“Certainly people took a while to go back into the labor force as we came away from COVID. Certainly businesses had to adjust and figure things out. People didn’t really get back into that work mode. So it’s taken a little while,” Isley continued.
Some key findings from the report show that unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 20 years.
Hourly wages are also $32 on average in the private sector. Despite this, however, the report notes that real earnings have remained where they were in 2019.
“We’ve certainly seen the hourly wage rise, and it continues to rise. The weekly take-home is more muted. People are earning more per hour, but they’re …