Jobs and Hints of Recession

The official unemployment rate was 4.1% in June. It had been 4.2% in July. It’s been one or the other for the last year. (Just prior to that, in April and May of 2024, the rates were 3.9% and 4%.) Yet for many specific subsets of the general rate, the unemployment rate was quite high and it got higher. It is thus a kind of mystery why the overall official rate did not rise more. Here are examples of last month’s changes in specific unemployment rates:

Persons with a disability: + 1.4 to 10%

Teens: + .8 to 15.2%    Black teens: + 2.5 to 21.7%

African Americans + .4 to 7.2%

Asian  + .4 to 3.9%

Some of these were large increases and the resultant unemployment rates were horrendous. But white rates increased only .1 to 3.7%, and for the whole class of adults, the unemployment rate also advanced only .1 to 4% for men, and .1% to 3.7% for women. Those numbers fit with the tiny increase of .1 in the overall official unemployment rate from 4.1% to 4.2%.

However, NJFAN’s Full Count shows that job markets were much weaker than the official rates showed. The total number of officially unemployed increased by .2 million to 7 million. To that group we add part-timers who want full-time work and people who want jobs but are not currently searching or not searching in the right way. In each of those categories, the unemployment rate rose. NJFAN’s full count of truly unemployed persons increased by .6 million people to a total of 18.1 million persons. Our unemployment rate was 10.3%. in July. That’s two and a half times the official rate.

This darker view of things is in line with other economic negatives. The labor force participation rate measures the share of the adult population that is working or searching for work. That rate fell half of a percentage point from 62.7 to 62.2 over the past year. Not so much but moving in the wrong direction. In past two months the civilian labor force declined by 168,000. Some of that must reflect the government attack on immigrant workers. Yet, oddly, most of the added unemployment involves not people losing or leaving jobs but new entrants searching for work and not finding it. That increased the total number of unemployed by 275,000.  Are more people desperate for jobs?  Or are more of these people searching because they are confident that they will find jobs? 

It is hard to believe that most workers today, especially those on the lower half of the income ladder, feel confident about the economy. Federal officials spew hostility and those at the top of the Executive branch often do not know what they are doing and gladly do bad things. Chaos and cruelty— these characterize presidential policies. Every day there is uncertainty for employers and employees from attacks on immigrants and other threats to the labor supply. Ever-changing tariff policies disrupt labor conditions and ultimately lift consumer prices. Tariffs mean higher prices for imports—that’s the point--and most of the increase will be paid first by importers and then consumers--We the People. One estimate is that Trump’s tariffs will cost the average household over $2000 a year. And, of course, the pain will be greater for low-income households.

Higher tariffs and hunting immigrants have done nothing to “bring back” manufacturing jobs. Their number has fallen by 37,000 over the last three months. And factory construction, which boomed under President Biden, is in decline. Meanwhile, job growth in the information sector was non-existent over the last three months, and, overall, tech companies cut 75,000 jobs from January through May. Is that AI devouring its creators?

Other bad news, unless you hate Federal employees and the work that they do: Federal jobs are down by 71,000 over the year. Also, thousands more are not at work anymore but are being paid “deferred resignations,” and thus not yet counted as unemployed. 

Another negative comes from the Establishment nonfarm job numbers that are based on employers’ reports. The initial estimate for July was an increase of 73,000—not so hot. But employers are always tardy, so the reports for these numbers always trickle in over several months and that means several adjustments are made to the initial estimates for each month. This time there was a real shocker: the numbers for May and June were adjusted downward by a combined 258,000, meaning essentially no net gain. 

Some commentators, including Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics, think there’s a recession brewing. There was little economic growth in the first quarter but good growth of 3% in the second quarter. The latter sounds like a plus to me, but high tariffs and a messed-up labor supply may sink the economy.

Meanwhile, back at the castle, Trump wants to ban bad news about jobs. He has made no effort to understand how the numbers work, nor did his sycophants try to get him to face reality. In the end it was, in effect, off with her head for the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Erika McEntarfer had nothing directly to do with the calculations, but this is the way things are done now by the royals over at the palace.

Frank Stricker is a writer for and a board member of the National Jobs for All Network. He also supports and writes for Dollars & Sense.