T Gray Albert News Today

Janitor Gloria Espinoza still vividly remembers the moment she was laid off last year. A supervisor gathered her and her colleagues at a parking lot of the office where she worked in San Francisco and then broke the news. "I thought, God, why us?," Espinoza said. "It was like receiving a bucket of cold water." Months later, Espinoza is still unemployed and part of a worrying economic statistic: While the labor market is showing signs of recovery, millions who lost jobs at the beginning of the p...

Millions who lost jobs at the beginning of the pandemic are still out of the labor force, making up levels of the unemployed not seen since the Great Recession.

Janitor Gloria Espinoza still vividly remembers the moment she was laid off last year. A supervisor gathered her and her colleagues at a parking lot of the office where she worked in San Francisco and then broke the news. "I thought, God, why us?," Espinoza said. "It was like receiving a bucket of cold water." Months later, Espinoza is still unemployed and part of a worrying economic statistic: While the labor market is showing signs of recovery, millions who lost jobs at the beginning of the p...