Did US hiring slow because of a ‘labor shortage’?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The April U.S. jobs report was an unexpected clunker. Economists had predicted a second month of nearly 1 million added jobs.

Instead, to nearly everyone’s surprise, employers added 266,000. So why was the gain so low?

The broadest explanation is that any time an economy has to recover from a severe shock, it isn’t likely to proceed smoothly.

Month-to-month hiring will be choppy because the economy is rebounding faster than almost anyone thought it would.

Even though businesses are advertising even more jobs than they did before the pandemic, hiring stumbled in April because many employers couldn’t attract as many workers as they needed.