Many retail jobs that disappeared during the pandemic might not return, says commerce secretary

• Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Thursday said a lot of retail jobs may not return.
• Raimondo told CNBC that retail jobs "might not be coming back, or coming back in the same numbers."
• The US added 850,000 payrolls in June, beating expectations.

Many US retail and service-industry jobs that went away during the pandemic weren't expected to return, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

"The real issue, I think, is that a lot of the jobs that folks lost are the kinds of jobs - let's say, for example, in retail or services industries - that might not be coming back, or coming back in the same numbers," Raimondo told CNBC on Thursday.

Earlier, the Labor Department reported 364,000 jobless claims for the previous week, marking a pandemic-era low. Raimondo's comments came ahead of Friday's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed the US adding 850,000 payrolls in June, beating expectations.

But the future of work for retail employees and others remained more complex, as the world slowly returned to normal following the COVID-19, Raimondo said.

"To be very honest, it's so hard to tell in the data" why people weren't returning to work, Raimondo said.

Teenagers, for example, were taking fewer jobs in June than they had been in the spring, perhaps because the labor shortage allowed them to choose the highest-paying jobs.

There's also been an uptick in "rage-quitting" among workers, including frontline retail employees. Others were using labor shortages to secure higher pay.

Raimondo on Thursday said the US had to "lean into" job training and apprenticeships, in part because of the shrinking amount of retail jobs available.

"Because the jobs that are being created in cybersecurity or in the digital economy and in the tech economy are there, and are good paying," she said on CNBC. "We need to make sure that the folks who are unemployed have the skills that they need to get those jobs."