The Latest Job Calamity—Mostly Home-Made

The government’s report on jobs and unemployment in July appeared on August 7, 2026. It was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as The Employment Situation—July 2026.

Some of the basics look pretty good. The official unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, which is, by mainstream standards, quite low and essentially full employment. But can anything like the latter judgment be true, given the turbulence raining down on many workers in our society?  Not to mention the fact--well-known to loyal readers—that BLS unemployment numbers always underestimate real unemployment levels. We, at the National Jobs for All Network, believe that real unemployment was much higher at around 10.1%.

Also, even though official rates for specific categories of workers underestimate the real level of unemployment, some of them still document real problems in U.S. labor markets. For example, even the official unemployment rates were 18.8% for black teens and 6.3% for the whole category of African Americans. Other information shows that black people are facing added challenges in the midst of apparently strong labor markets. For example, more Black mothers with young children are being pushed out of the workplace. The causes include right-wing attacks on diversity and fewer opportunities to work at home, thanks to edicts from President Trump and other forward-looking leaders. But whatever the specific cause, the result is more non-employment.

Despite the pleasantly low official unemployment rate, job markets are a wreck in other respects too. And they have been for quite a while. Bad news did not begin in July. The whole of 2025 was a down year for job creation. Non-farm jobs, recorded in employer reports (“payroll” or “establishment jobs”), increased by just 164, 000 from January through December. That was a 0.1% increase for the whole year. Not one percent, but one-tenth of one percent.

In the first seven months of 2026, we did only a little better: we added a total of 266,000 such jobs, or 38,000 a month. In good times we add 200,000 in a month. (The bar-graph called Chart 2 on page 1 of the BLS’s July Employment Situation gives you a good picture of the dreary record of job creation.) This year, job-adds have been significant in only three of seven months.

Meanwhile, there was truly shocking news in the BLS’s household survey. The monthly number of employed persons has fallen by 963,000 so far this year. Did the fact that we got rid of a million immigrant workers have anything to do with that number? The slots left by ousted immigrants should have been filled by all those unemployed native-born Americans lusting for work. And surely employers acted like classical economists say they should have--they raised wages to lure new workers. Utopia for non-immigrants: more jobs, better pay.

But so far, few jobs have been added to the total, and there have been no after-inflation gains to wages. In part, due to the war on Iran, while apparent wages have risen, inflation has eaten up all the increase. The hourly pay that the average worker now sees on the pay stub increased 3.2% from July of  ’25 through July of  ’26. The consumer price index increased by 3.3% over the same period. The math is not complicated. It’s not just Trump who failed on this score, but it is clear that he knows little about important matters and that he rarely exerts himself to study anything. At times he is aggressively apathetic about the tough times that people are going through.

But didn’t cuts in the immigrant labor force open up a lot of jobs that “real” Americans can take? Here the anti-immigrant forces applied the primitive logic that was used to argue for higher tariffs. Factory job totals have been falling or stagnant for years. We buy a lot of stuff from foreign producers. Solution: make foreign products more expensive, people will buy American-made stuff, and natives will get more factory jobs. How did that work out? Cabinet secretaries and Trump lie about this all the time, but there has been essentially no growth in manufacturing employment. Could it be that important policy issues are often complex?

How about the latest job-creation program of assaulting, arresting, and expelling immigrants?  Did that open many jobs?  We have statistics on job vacancies and they show little change. The highest number of vacancies was in April of this year at 7,585,000, but two of the lowest numbers of vacancies were also in this year, in February and March. Overall, there has been no significant jump in job openings, which is what we might have expected from the administration’s campaign to shove immigrants out of their jobs.

Using the same kind of logic as Trump used for the manufacturing question, anti-immigrant forces believed that if we threw hundreds of thousands of people out of their jobs, there would be hundreds of thousands of new job vacancies. But in real life there are countervailing factors and complications in social and economic systems.

Job markets are interconnected to other parts of the world. John Miller pointed out in the July-August, 2026 issue of Dollars and Sense that when you eject hundreds of thousands of workers from their jobs, you not only reduce the labor supply; you cut people’s incomes and if they have less money, they buy less and the businesses they buy from sell less. The authors of the Brookings’ study, Shock and Awe, and Economic Fallout (May 29, 2026), point out that rapidly removing many employees from many jobs disrupts the normal flow of business operations. Many immigrant workers have jobs that are integrated into systems—a business and a market. It is not easy to replace all kinds of workers. Some of the fired workers are skilled workers and good workers, unlike some American political leaders. The Brookings’ authors estimate that just through September of 2025, the Shock-and-Awe campaign carried out by ICE to remove immigrants from the United States, cost the economy 668,000 jobs. Only time will tell if some of these losses will be reversed or statistically revised, but there is little evidence for those options so far.

Right now, millions of people in the United States eke out an existence on very small incomes, live in fear for their safety, and worry about being able to work. They are being made to pay the price for the fact that the American leadership class cannot and has no will to figure out how to create enough good jobs for native-born people and immigrants. Indeed, many of the leading capitalists who visit the White House and who have grabbed more riches than any ruling class in history are racing to get unbelievably richer by promoting new ways to put more people out of work with more AI. AI is a huge threat to Americans jobs, but many of the very rich Robber Barons who run the tech empire do not want even to pay their fair share of taxes on the trillions they have made. Some, such as the captain of Google, have already left the state of California to escape reasonable taxes on their bulging wealth.
 
Sources for the article include three essential reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: The Employment Situation—July 2026, Real Earnings—July 2026, and Job Openings and Labor Turnover—June 2026.  Also: Maya Prakash, “Black Mothers Leave Workforce at a Staggering Rate,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2026, A12; John Miller, “No Improvements for U.S.-Born Workers,” Dollars and Sense, July/August, 2026; and Marcela Escobari, Ian Seyal, and Paul Beach, Shock, Awe, and Economic Fallout: The Employment Effects of ICE Enforcement in US Cities (Brookings, May 29, 2026).  And valuable suggestions from June Zaccone at NJFAN.