Small business job growth and hourly earnings declined slightly in November, according to payroll giant Paychex, amid signs of a slowdown in the economy as businesses continue to struggle with rising COVID-19 infections across the country.
Small business hiring fell 0.03 percent, while hourly earnings growth slowed for the fifth month in a row, from a peak of 3.29 percent in June to 2.76 percent in November, according to the Paychex | IHS Markit Small Business Employment Watch. The number of weekly hours worked also showed a decrease of 0.04 percent year over year.
The agency proposed changes in December to how customer relationships affect the definition of brokered funds, which has big implications for banks that are not well capitalized.
Mastercard has increased the contactless payment limit to CA$250 across Canada to provide consumers with a safer way to pay during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bonnie Sinnock is National Mortgage News' Capital Markets Editor at Arizent and has worked for NMN and affiliated publications since 1995. Her previous roles have included assisting in the coordination of origination coverage, technology reporting and chronicling cross-border issues.
Bonnie currently edits and writes about mortgage capital markets topics that include servicing, acquisitions, industry funding sources, securitization and other secondary market sales. Secondary market topics covered include two government-sponsored enterprise loan buyers that the U.S. has been considering spinning off part of in a new and potentially groundbreaking initial public offering.
She also has contributed articles to multiple award-winning Arizent series, including:
- Election Coverage (Finalist, Neal Awards 2025), for her 2024 reporting on the likelihood Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform in the second Trump administration
- Online Single-Topic Coverage by a Team (American Society of Business Editors, Regional Bronze 2023), for participating in group reporting about industry layoffs.
- Online Breaking News Coverage (Regional Bronze, Azbees 2021) for contributing to a package of stories on about the initial impact of the pandemic on the mortgage market
- Best News Coverage (Neals 2016) for one of the articles in a package delving into multiple aspects of the transformative TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule
Other journalistic accomplishments and designations include:
- New York Financial Writers Association member
- Reporter for the NonProfit Times, the Courier News, and the Los Angeles Independent
- Published articles in the Los Angeles Times and the Saginaw News
- Bachelor of Science in Journalism degree from Northwestern University
Twitter: @bcynic
“Nothing has been moving for a few months in all the key employment indicators we look at and watch,” said Frank Fiorille, vice president of risk management, compliance and data analytics at Paychex. “They really have stabilized. I actually thought the index was going to be a lot lower given the COVID spikes, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it just moderately declined by 0.03 percent from October, which is relatively flat.”
Paychex competitor ADP also reported a slowing in small business job growth on the ADP National Employment Report, with small businesses adding 110,000 jobs in November, compared to 146,000 in October. Overall, the private sector added 307,000 jobs across businesses of all sizes, according to ADP, but that was down from 404,000 in October.
“While November saw employment gains, the pace continues to slow,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute, in a statement Wednesday. “Job growth remained positive across all industries and sizes.”
According to Paychex, the South remained the top-ranked region of the U.S. for employment growth, a full one point above the next highest region. The Northeast was the only region with weekly earnings growth above 3 percent. Texas has climbed one spot in the state rankings for each month for the past quarter, now ranking first among states in job growth.
Construction led the way among industries in terms of job growth for the seventh consecutive month. However, the leisure and hospitality industry lagged far behind with the weakest number on Paychex’s index for the past eight months. While leisure and hospitality ranked in first place among the sectors in terms of hourly earnings growth (increasing 4.15 percent), it was last in terms of weekly hours worked growth (declining 2.44 percent). Unlike other sectors, the financial activities sector didn’t experience a significant disruption in weekly hours worked as growth has been steadily positive and consistent during 2020.
With Congress again talking about passing a stimulus package before the end of the year and President-elect Joe Biden set to take office in January, he advises accountants to keep a close watch on the changes coming out of Washington.
“I guess the message would be that it’s not a time to take your eye off the ball,” said Fiorille. “Watch the stuff and be educated, because given COVID, given a new administration, new people coming into Congress, new leadership, there’s probably going to be more change with that.”
He is also seeing changes happening at the state level. “There’s a lot going on within state governments, whether it’s on the employment law front or minimum wage, or paid sick leave or unique taxes,” said Fiorille. “It seems like a lot of states are doing their own stuff. Be aware and be mindful of that.”
Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office issued a reporton the federal response to COVID-19, including the challenges faced by the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department in processing of employer tax credits, distributing Economic Impact Payments and in reaching individuals who may be eligible, but have not yet received an EIP, as well as the IRS’s implementation of the Presidential Memorandum on employee payroll tax deferral, and the IRS processing of amended individual and corporate income tax returns. The GAO recommended that the Treasury, in coordination with the IRS, should begin tracking and publicly reporting the number of individuals who were mailed an EIP notification letter and filed for and received an EIP, and use that information to inform ongoing outreach and communications efforts.
The report also found problems with the way the Department of Labor has been tracking unemployment statistics, in part due to delays in reporting by states that have been overwhelmed by unemployment claims. The GAO recommended that the Labor Department revise its weekly news releases to clarify that in the current unemployment environment, the numbers it reports for weeks of unemployment claimed don’t accurately estimate the number of unique individuals claiming benefits. The report also suggested the Labor Department should pursue options to report the actual number of distinct individuals claiming benefits, such as by collecting the data that’s already available from states.
“Clearly states are in various stages of how quickly they can get to them,” said Fiorille. “We kind of kid around that we’ve seen some job postings for COBOL programmers because some of these systems were designed in COBOL, so they’re not state of the art, to say the least. Depending on the state, you’ve seen delays and issues in the whole control function of that. Clearly you also have some fraud involved. You’re seeing more and more on that. Whenever you have this kind of chaos, like you’re reading about with the PPP program because they needed to get the money out quickly, they didn’t really have time to set up the walls and guardrails. It sounds like some of the numbers were overstated, which in some sense would be good that not as many people are on unemployment. In fact, the numbers that came out today were positive. The new UI numbers and the continuing claims were both down, but there’s still a lot of people hurting. It’s still not a good picture.”
