The nation is almost back to pre-pandemic employment levels, but rural areas are lagging in several ways, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Essentially, metropolitan counties lost a greater share of the labor force in the early months of the pandemic than rural counties did, but metro counties gained back a greater share of jobs than rural counties did, Bill Bishop and Tim Marema report.

"In metropolitan counties, the size of the labor force bounced back from May 2020 to May 2021 and is now only 0.9% lower than it was in May 2019, before the pandemic," they report.

Read the full article about the rural labor force by Heather Chapman at The Rural Blog.