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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
What the latest jobs report means for you … buckle up
By Alicia Wallace, CNN
Updated:
4:00 AM EDT, Sat September 6, 2025
Source: CNN
After years of , healthy pay bumps and pandemic savings-fueled spending
sprees, American workers now face a sobering economic reality: It’s
getting harder and harder to find work, and more and more industries
are shedding jobs.
The , released Friday, indicated that the US economy added about 22,000
jobs in August and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, the
highest it’s been in nearly four years.
The job market is “stalling,” Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao told
CNN on Friday, “it’s slowing to a dangerous speed.”
Job growth is practically nonexistent.
And if the , that doesn’t bode well for the overall health of the
economy.
Here’s a rundown of the latest data, and how the situation could turn
around or take a turn for the worse:
Takeaways from the August jobs report
Job growth hasn’t just been weak, it turned negative recently: During
the past three months, the US economy has seen a net gain of roughly
29,000 jobs per month, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
If that sounds soft, it’s because it is: Excluding the at the start
of the pandemic, that’s the slowest three-month average since the
summer of 2010, when the United States was still clawing its way back
from the Great Recession.
Bringing that average down was a now-negative report for June. The
second revision for that month ( from US businesses) now shows a net
loss of 13,000 jobs.
More industries lost jobs in August than added them: The jobs report
contains a nerdy little gauge (a diffusion index) that is meant show
the breadth of employment changes across 250 private-sector industries.
If it’s above 50, that means more industries added jobs than lost
them. It’s been under 50 since April and measured 49.6 in August.
Most of those gains, however, were minimal.
And the hardest-hit sectors are those in the goods business: The impact
of President Donald Trump’s , and the whipsaw manner in which it’s
being applied, is having an “undeniable” impact on hiring, RSM US
economist Joe Brusuelas wrote in a note to investors Friday.
Goods businesses have posted “four straight months of declines since
May,” he wrote. “Manufacturing, which was supposed to benefit from
restrictive trade policies, instead slipped into reverse as supply
chain uncertainty deepened.”
Opportunities are growing increasingly limited: The health care
industry, which has an aging US populus working in its favor, has been
a leading driver of employment growth in recent years.
Now it’s practically the only game in town.
Health care businesses added an estimated 46,800 jobs in August. The
industry, however, accounts for only 15% of overall US employment, BLS
data shows.
“For 85% of workers, they’re not seeing a lot of the jobs
added,” Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics Americas, told
CNN this week.
The “canary in the coal mine” is chirping: The unemployment rate
for Black workers in the United States rose again last month to 7.5%,
the highest level since October 2021.
During the past two months, the unemployment rate for Black workers has
risen considerably higher, jumping from 6% to 6.8% in June and then
to 7.2% in July.
“The unemployment rate for Black workers will usually rise more than
for [White workers] when the labor market weakens, but they usually
move in the same direction,” economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the
Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted on Friday.
By comparison, the unemployment rate for White workers fell by 0.1
percentage point, to 3.7%.
A rise in the is often considered the foretelling a broader-scale job
market slowdown.
Black workers are disproportionately employed in frontline and
lower-wage industries as well as the government workforce. Economists
warned earlier this year that Trump’s sweeping policy changes related
to , , , as well as a crackdown on efforts, could reverse some of the
made recently by women, Black workers, Latino workers and other
underrepresented Americans.
How things can turn for the worse, or the better
Economic headwinds and uncertainty are putting a drag on hiring:
There’s not one single cause for the slowing job market, but
uncertainty certainly hasn’t helped, Glassdoor economist Zhao said.
“Even before this year, the job market was on a slowing trend,
interest rates have been fairly high, but we do see with the data in
the last few months that some of these tariff-sensitive sectors like
manufacturing or construction have slowed and in fact, started losing
jobs,” he said. “So, there does seem to be some impact from tariffs
and the uncertainty associated with them.”
“It’s not just the fact that there are these tariffs being
implemented, policy uncertainty makes it very hard for businesses to
commit to hiring plans,” he added.
Rising unemployment can get out of hand … quickly: The unemployment
rate of 4.3% still lands within that “healthy”/full employment
arena, but if it keeps rising, that’s a big problem.
Unemployment has stayed relatively low in part because of dampened
demand for workers as well as a depressed supply (people aging out of
the workforce as well as reductions in immigrant workers).
“But, as we start to see unemployment rise, that does start to
suggest that this is not just because of shifts on the labor supply
side,” Zhao said. “When unemployment starts to rise, those impacts
can start to stack up very quickly and unpredictably.”
And if the job market cools further, that means less money in the
pockets of American households — and less spending to support more
hiring.
“That can build into a cycle of a sharper economic slowdown,” he
said.
But a recession isn’t necessarily imminent: The current labor market
dynamics are a function of cyclical and structural factors driven
largely by trade and immigration policy, said Brusuelas. Those
dynamics, as well as the effects of “pervasive uncertainty” will
play out over the near to medium term, he noted Friday.
“We expect growth and hiring to reaccelerate as the combination of
interest rate cuts, tax cuts and full expensing of business investment
bolster demand for labor later this year and early next,” he wrote in
the note. “Thus, we do not expect the economy to slip into recession
in the near term.”
An , could unleash pent-up demand: Toward the end of last year,
including after the election, hiring and investment picked up and so
did sentiment – especially as inflation appeared to be getting tamed,
Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist at Lightcast, told CNN.
“Then that got squandered, when we started doing tariffs, and that
possibility of inflation got introduced, then the [Federal Reserve] was
like, ‘Hey, all that stuff’s off the table now’ — and so, all
of this underground fervor was gone,” he said. “When you lower the
interest rate, the Fed is signaling, ‘We think it’s time to start
this engine again.’”
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