Janitor Gloria Espinoza still vividly remembers the moment she was laid off last year.
A supervisor gathered her and her colleagues at a parking lot of the office where she worked in San Francisco and then broke the news.
"I thought, 'God, why us?'," Espinoza said. "It was like receiving a bucket of cold water."
Months later, Espinoza is still unemployed and part of a worrying economic statistic: While the labor market is showing signs of recovery, millions who lost jobs at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago are still out of the labor force.