Mayday! Mayday! Jobs, Health Care, and Trump’s Tantrum

Okay, the U.S. labor market isn’t sinking, but it is taking on water—hence two maydays, not three, which is the traditional call of distress for pilots and mariners. And that’s despite the May jobs report that President Donald Trump called “very strong” before he stomped off the set of “Meet the Press” in a huff during an interview earlier this month. But Trump wasn’t the only one to praise the May jobs report. Wall Street Journal reporter Harriet Torry declared that “the U.S. labor market has climbed out of a rut.”

According to the May jobs report, which was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the economy did add 172,000 jobs in May, its third straight month of job gains. That was double the forecasted number of new jobs, not triple, as Trump has claimed. And it was much better than the dismal average of 49,000 new jobs per month posted by the low-fire, low-hire 2025 labor market, as then-Fed chair Jerome Powell called it.

But that hardly makes the May jobs report, or the Trump administration’s jobs-creation record, anything to crow about. To begin with, the 172,000 new jobs that were added in May were barely different from the 168,000 monthly average of new jobs in 2024, which was during the last year of the Biden administration. 

Also, while the official unemployment rate remained relatively low at 4.3%, it was no different than the average rate in 2025, and higher than the 4.0% average in 2024. More importantly, the BLS’s most comprehensive measure of unemployment (the U-6) was still 8.1% in May 2026 after three months of positive job growth. That was higher than the 8.0% average U-6 rate in 2025, and much higher than the 7.5% average U-6 rate in 2024.  (The U-6 measure adds both workers who want a job and have looked for one within the last year, as well as workers forced to work part time because they couldn’t find a full-time job, to the official unemployment count.)

On top of that, the share of the unemployed who had gone more than half a year without a job was 27.5% in May. That was higher than any time since December 2021. If the labor market has climbed out of a rut, it has left over one quarter of the unemployed far behind. 

Only Health Care and Social Assistance Jobs

Even more concerning is the extreme concentration of job growth in a single industry: health care and social assistance (which includes counseling, caregiving, child care, and vocational support jobs). Part of the private sector, health care and social assistance employ a disproportionately female workforce. In 2025, women accounted for 77.9% of the sector’s workers, compared with  47.1% of private-sector workers overall. The sector has also been responsible for nearly all private-sector job growth in recent years.

Excluding health care and social assistance, private-sector employment increased by just 4,800 jobs since December 2023. In fact, the rest of the private sector lost 390,000 jobs in 2025, while gains in the health care and social assistance sector offset those losses, leaving the private sector with a net gain of 296,000 jobs. Although the leisure and hospitality sector added the largest number of new jobs last month, health care and social assistance still accounted for two-fifths of all new private-sector jobs.  

Based on the BLS data, the health care and social assistance sector in California did more to drive job creation than it did in any other state. From March 2022 to March 2026, the number of jobs in California’s health care and social assistance sector increased 25.3%. And without those jobs, California’s private sector would have experienced net job losses over that four-year period.   

While the increase in health care and social assistance jobs was a boon to those who got jobs in the sector, it did little to lift the wages of California workers. Providing services for the elderly and the disabled was one of California’s fastest growing jobs over the three years beginning in third quarter 2022. Yet, in the third quarter of 2025, the average pay for those jobs was only $487 a week, or just over $25,000 a year. 

The record is clear. Without the health care and social assistance sector, U.S. job growth would have come to a near halt. 

On top of that, even as the economy has added jobs over the last three months, workers’ wages have not kept up with inflation. Consumer prices rose more quickly than average hourly earnings, eating into workers’ purchasing power. The combination of slowing wage increases and rising prices pushed workers’ inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings back to what they were in January 2025, when Trump began his second term. That hardly qualifies as a very strong jobs report.

 Stock Market Jitters and Complaints

To add insult to injury, the May jobs report led stock investors to believe that the Fed would soon raise interest rates. That rattled the stock market. Stock prices fell sharply, especially the price of tech stocks. The Nasdaq, the index of the average price of tech stocks, fell by more than 4% on the day the jobs report was released, its worst day in over a year. (Though the indexes did recover their lost ground within a week.)

The stock market reaction enraged and confounded Trump. “With a great Jobs Report, like just announced, stocks should go up, not down,” he insisted on Truth Social. “That’s the way it was for 200 years.”

Not really. Let me explain. Interest rates are the yield or rate of return on bonds, the chief alternative investment outlet to the stock market. Higher interest rates make bonds more attractive, and investors move their money out of stocks into bonds. The demand for stocks falls, and in turn so do stock prices. In addition, higher interest rates drive up the cost of borrowing, dampening the expected profits of corporations. That reduces the demand for growth stocks, such as tech stocks, whose evaluation is especially sensitive to expected profits.

Even the May jobs report, which Trump tried to pass off as much stronger than it was, still convinced investors that the Fed would soon raise interest rates to fight inflation, and ignore its mandate to maintain maximum employment, which is consistent with standard Fed practice. What’s more, Trump’s war of choice with Iran was the chief cause of the elevated inflation rates. So, the stock market’s reaction shouldn’t have been a mystery to Trump. 

What’s needed now is not higher interest rates and monetary austerity, which would slow down economic growth and cost working people their jobs. Nor is the answer more of Trump’s reckless spending policies that endanger all of us as they drive up prices and make life yet harder for those who already can’t make ends meet. Instead, we need to put an end to Trump’s war spending and his tax cuts for the wealthy and redirect those monies to public spending, especially spending on social support programs. That would make economic growth more equitable and sustainable as it helps to improve workers’ standard of living in a labor market that creates jobs. That would make for a May Day we could celebrate. 

John Miller is a professor emeritus of economics at Wheaton College and a member of the Dollars & Sense collective.