More pain to come as harshest US downturn in history sees job losses for 20.5 million Americans

It took just one month for the labour market in the world’s largest economy to capsize. It will take longer for the damage to be fully realised.

In the harshest downturn for American workers in history, employers cut an unprecedented 20.5 million jobs in April, tripling the unemployment rate to 14.7 per cent, the highest since the Great Depression era of the 1930s. And it’s only set to worsen in May, as cuts spread further into white-collar work.

“It’s devastating,” said Ryan Sweet, head of monetary policy research at Moody’s Analytics. “There’s someone behind each of these numbers. It’s going to take years to recover from this. There’s a case to be made that a lot of these are temporary lay-offs, so hopefully people can return to work quickly as we begin to reopen the economy – but there’s no guarantee in that.”

The coronavirus pandemic brought the US economy to a standstill after a record-long expansion, with April’s losses erasing roughly all of the jobs added over the past decade. It also laid bare just how precarious employment is for vast swathes of Americans, with an outsize impact on lower-paid workers as well as women and minorities.

With a steep recession under way, the destruction of jobs heaps election-year pressure on US President Donald Trump to restart the economy and show results by November. But with little containment of a contagious disease that’s killed 75,000 Americans and counting, business is returning unevenly and slowly if at all, and signs are mounting that many employers will be forced to make the cuts permanent.