Where Are the Jobs--Part II?

 Financial FAQs

“Job creation took a step back in 2025, with private employers adding 398,000 jobs, down from 771,000 in 2024. While we've seen a continuous and dramatic slowdown in job creation for the past three years, wage growth has remained stable.” ADP

FREDpayrolls

The FRED (St. Louis Federal Reserve) graph tells it all. Job formation has almost disappeared in the Trump economy. It’s not only the shutdowns, which have delayed the official U.S. unemployment report that was due for January, but past months as well, so private payroll data processors like ADP fill in the knowledge gap.

But we know from the latest FRED graph of private payroll hiring that private employers are barely hiring. Just 74,000 jobs were created in November 2025 and 22,000 in January, as reported by ADP.

So the GDP growth spurts last fall 2025 are from the $ trillions being invested in AI energy centers, not in corporations expanding their workforce. Corporations are laying off workers instead.

The best examples are Amazon and now the Washington Post. The NYTimes just reported that the Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs “that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

“The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said,” said the NYTimes

CBS News reports that in 2025, companies directly pointed to their use of AI in announcing 55,000 job cuts — more than 12 times the number of layoffs attributed to AI just two years earlier, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Of those job losses, 51,000 were in tech, with most of the cuts concentrated in tech-heavy states such as California and Washington.

The main culprit are the tariffs that Trump is using to coerce concessions from foreign governments, but it is doing the most damage to Americans. U.S. vehicle sales plunged in January, for example. Automobile sales increased at an annual rate of 14.9 million in January, down 7% from 16.1 million in the final month of 2025, according to Wards Intelligence and profit losses of $billions have already been reported by GM and Ford due to the higher tariffs on aluminum and steel.

Consumers above all are reacting to the sudden changes in the employment picture. The Conference Board voiced their concerns in the headlineConfidence collapsed to lowest point since 2014, surpassing pandemic depths: “The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® fell by 9.7 points in January to 84.5 (1985=100), from an upwardly revised 94.2 in December. A 5.1-point upward revision to December’s reading of the Index resulted in a slight increase last month, reversing the initially reported decline. However, January’s preliminary results showed confidence resumed declining after a one-month uptick.

So unemployed workers are now suffering under both the rising inflation from the tariffs and AI replacing many of their jobs.

It’s not a pretty picture, while we are still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether most of Trump’s tariffs are even legal. It much safer to do nothing in such circumstances—consumers to hold on to their savings and employers to replace their workers with more technology.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Too Many Job Openings?

 Financial FAQs

The number of job openings was little changed at 7.8 million in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the month, both hires and total separations were little changed at 5.5 million and 5.2 million, respectively. Within separations, quits (3.3 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.6 million) changed little.” BLS.GOV

Calculated Risk

The Labor Department’s monthly JOLTS report can be confusing. When the BLS uses the term “little changed”, they mean changes that barely move the needle of the approximately 5 million jobs created and lost each month in the U.S. economy.

But there were still 7.8 million vacant jobs in May seeking workers, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS report, whereas ADP, a U.S. private payrolls data collector, just reported companies eliminated 33,000 jobs last month, marking the first decline since March 2023.

We are now seeing a weakening in the jobs market that consumers are beginning to worry about in the various consumer confidence surveys and are already cutting back on their spending that drives most (70%) of economic growth.

The above graph shows job openings (black line), hires (dark blue), Layoff, Discharges and other (red column), and Quits (light blue column) from the JOLTS. The difference between hirings and separations approximates the monthly number of jobs created.

How do we square the conflicting payroll data with the official U.S, unemployment report that follows end of the month? Private employers reduced jobs in June for the first time in more than two years, as U.S. trade wars created a “hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers,” said ADP chief economist Dr. Nela Richardson.

The service industries that fill the leisure activity, dining, professional services and transportation sectors lost 66,000 jobs, while the goods producers, such as construction and manufacturing gained 32,000 jobs.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, because large parts of the service industries rely on lower paid immigrants, many of them undocumented, and suddenly many are no longer to be found. The Department of Homeland Security may have rounded up some 100,000 to date but want to deport 3 million a year.

This will devastate the U.S. economy, because the service industries employ most (80 percent) of American workers. Why are Republicans ignoring that fact in the big beautiful (or ugly) bill that was sent back to the House to finalize?

Instead of being employed and supporting the American economy, the undocumented (mostly from the other Americas) will be incarcerated in concentration camps while being processed for deportation, much like the Nazis did in World War Two.

It’s not surprising since it’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party now that includes many Neo-Nazis (remember the Charlottesville torch carriers) among his MAGA supporters.

And companies that depend on imports must reckon with whatever the final tariffs rates will be. Trump has only announced one agreement with the UK to date, and a tentative agreement with Vietnam. The tariffs on Vietnamese imports with be raised to 20 percent, which includes products that have been rerouted from China to avoid Chinese tariffs. So the Vietnamese tariff hike may have an outsize effect.

Trump can continue to postpone the inevitable by delaying the tariff hikes for as long as possible with his TACO negotiating style (Trump Always Chickens Out). But Americans are not so foolish and will restrain their spending until we know who will ultimately pay for the higher tariffs.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan on Twitter: https://twittter.com/HarlanGreen