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

The anticipation for the U.S. jobs report for April, released Friday morning, was high

WASHINGTON -- The anticipation for the U.S. jobs report for April, released Friday morning, was high. Most experts agreed that after a yearlong pandemic, tens of millions of layoffs and widespread disease and death, a likely second straight month of nearly 1 million added jobs would send a clear signal: The economy was bounding back toward full health after a devastating recession. Instead, the report was a clunker. To nearly everyone's surprise, employers added a comparatively paltry 266,000 jobs, down drastically from a gain of 770,000 in March, which itself was revised down from an initially much higher figure of 916,000. Once the shock wore off, economists grappled with a host of questions, starting with: What happened last month — and why? What did the tepid hiring gain say about the state of the job market and the economy? And is there really a labor shortage?