Restaurants and bars slightly shrank their payrolls in June, even as hiring across other fields remained robust with the addition of more than 209,000 jobs, according to new statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.6%, the agency reported Friday morning.
Last month marked the rare occasion when other economic sectors outpaced eating and drinking places in hiring. BLS figures show restaurant and bar jobs declined by nearly 1,000 positions, leaving the business with a total of 12.3 million employees.
The decline came as many public chains are still reporting significant growth in same-restaurant sales. But the increases in many instances have come from higher pricing rather than traffic gains. Handling fewer guests means fewer employees may be needed.
The decline snaps a 28-month run of increased hiring by restaurants and bars. The industry remained the United States’ second largest employer, behind healthcare. Yet restaurants remain one of the few industries that have yet to recover jobs lost during the pandemic. Restaurants and bars remain about 80,000 jobs short of where they were in February 2020.
In contrast to restaurants, hotels stepped up their hiring during the month, extending their head counts by 5,500 hundred. The additions raised total employment in that sector to 1.9 million.
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