Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said the focus now must be on getting people connected to jobs after at least 7.5 million Americans lost their unemployment benefits on Monday with two emergency federal programs expiring on the Labor Day holiday.
"Since President Joe Biden has taken office, we've added 4.5 million jobs to our economy," Walsh said on "CBS This Morning."
"We're working through the Department of Labor, through our American job centers, to connect people and jobs."
According to a Washington Post report, there are 10 million vacant jobs in the U.S. and more than 8 million people looking for jobs. But Walsh acknowledged there has been a shift in the kind of work people will do.
"The Department of Labor since the beginning of the year has invested over $2 billion in job training, workforce development money," said Walsh. "We're getting money out into the communities to make sure we start to make those investments in the American Rescue Plan."
But still, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, the number one factor keeping many Americans from returning to work is the lack of childcare and the fear of the disease itself, said Walsh.
"As school starts this week, one of the things we have to monitor is that if some schools don't reopen over the next weeks, that's when we potentially have some issues where parents have no place to put their kids," said Walsh. "They'll be learning back on Zoom and parents will have to be home. We have to monitor that closely and quite honestly, that's why we need to get people vaccinated in this country, to get more and more Americans vaccinated."
Wash said his biggest piece of advice to a family facing concerns about returning to the workforce is to get vaccinated.
"Somehow vaccines have turned into a political issue," he said. "They're not a political issue. Where we're seeing these large cases of coronavirus, the supermajority, I think 98% of the people getting the delta variant aren't vaccinated. And so I would ask you to rethink your position on that because it's about keeping you safe and alive, keeping your family safe and alive, and the people around you."
Walsh added that he thinks Americans did a "great job" at the beginning of the pandemic by wearing masks and taking care of themselves."
Biden pushed the vaccines and got 200 million shots into people's arms in the first 100 days of his administration, but "we need to get more people vaccinated," said Walsh. "We need to continue to move our economy forward. But more importantly, we're going to need to make sure we take care of each other."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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