The U.S. jobs market may be stalling — and could miss the long-promised “soft landing,” economists said.
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by only 22,000 in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate increased slightly to 4.3%.
Additionally, the previous months’ gains were revised down again. June’s numbers slipped into the negative to instead reflect a loss of 13,000 jobs that month, the first recorded loss since December 2020.
“The job market is stalling short of the runway. The labor market is losing lift, and August’s report, along with downward revisions, suggests we’re heading into turbulence without the soft landing achieved,” Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s chief economist, said in a statement.
The U.S. has not seen job numbers slow at such a rate in the first eight months of the year since 2010, Laura Ullrich, Indeed’s director of economic research for North America, said in a statement.
“This anemic pace of job creation is not enough to keep unemployment from rising — a disturbing development in an environment where job openings, in addition to hiring, also remain weak,” Ullrich said.
This BLS report is the first to debut after President Donald Trump fired former Bureau Commissioner Erika McEntarfer over massive revisions in last month’s report.
But this year’s data “tells a story that worker sentiment saw coming long before official numbers caught up,” Mischa Fisher, economist at Udemy, said in a statement. “Job seekers and employees were living the reality of a dramatically weakened hiring environment. Today’s report and the accompanying prior-month’s revisions finally confirms they were right.”
Trump’s global trade policy, for example, has prompted worker anticipation of layoffs since earlier this year.