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Last month, the private sector picked up momentum, with the leisure and hospitality sector adding 164,000 jobs. The professional business sector grew by 100,000, manufacturing by 60,000 more jobs.Joining us from Chicago to explain what this means is Diane Swonk. She's the chief economist at Grant Thornton. That's a financial services firm. Diane, welcome back to the "NewsHour." Thanks for being with us. I wonder, big picture, you see these job numbers growing, unemployment dipped slightly. Overall, when you look at these, where are the picture it paints of where we are in the recovery?
Well, it means that we're finally making more progress again towards healing. We haven't fully recouped all the jobs lost, but we're whittling away at it much more rapidly. And I think we're going to see an acceleration once we go into November and December. The number of people who actually couldn't work because they were ill actually fell by 150,000 between September and October, again, a sign of the Delta wave easing its pressure on the U.S. economy that we saw over the summer. And even then, as we already heard, the economy was much more resilient during the summer. Also more important to note is how the private sector accelerated job gains and offset declines in education, which is a problem, but the good news is, they're picking up the baton from the public sector at a critical time, when many people have lost, millions have lost the unemployment benefits they had in September and the supplements to those benefits that lapsed in early September.
A few details that add some nuance to that report related to that, in fact, labor force participation did remain flat, right around 61, 62 percent. So about 100,000 more people did enter the work force, but millions still stayed out.That means there were still worker shortages. A lot of people thought that would change when those unemployment benefits went away and school started back up. How do you look at that work force number?
That is one of the biggest problems out there. Not only did we have 1.5 million excess retirements above the trend we had seen pre-pandemic during the pandemic. We don't know if those workers that are staying on the shadow, on the sidelines are actually going to come back. We also had lost a lot of workers to long-haul COVID as well. There's over a million workers that currently are struggling with long-haul COVID, which is a disability. They have not applied for disability yet. But that may be something we see going forward. But most importantly are the -- is the need to provide care, child care in particular. Not only did we see education employment continue to fall. School districts across the country have struggled to try to compete with the Amazons and Walmarts of the world to put support staff in place for many of the after-school programs that make it possible for low-wage parents and single parents to actually get back into the work force. That's really a hurdle out there. We also saw child care continue to decline, so -- in terms of employment. So that child care aspect of it, getting women back in the labor force, although they upticked in their participation a bit, that was after losing ground in September. We're still missing a lot of women that were hardest hit by the initial layoffs.
