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The US job market is dull and confusing this fall.
American companies mostly retain the employees they have. But they are reluctant to hire new people because they are having difficulty assessing how to use artificial intelligence and how to adjust to President Donald Trump’s unpredictable policies, particularly his double-digit taxes on imports from around the world.
Due to uncertainty job seekers struggle to find work or even get interviews. federal Reserve Policymakers are divided over whether the labor market needs more help than low interest rates. Their deliberations have been made more difficult as official reports on the health of the economy following a 43-day government shutdown have been arriving late and incomplete.
labor department Hopefully there will be at least some clarity when it releases November hiring and unemployment data on Tuesday, delayed by 11 days.
Forecasters surveyed by data firm FactSet expect employers added an unimpressive 40,000 jobs last month and unemployment to remain at 4.4%, unchanged from the last rate published for September.
The appointments have apparently lost momentum due to uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of higher interest rates set by the Fed in 2022 and 2023 to curb the inflation outbreak.
Revisions from the Labor Department in September showed the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than originally reported. This means employers added an average of only 71,000 new jobs per month over that period, not the 147,000 first reported. Since March, job creation has declined further – to an average of 59,000 per month.
In contrast, during 2021-2023, which occurred after the COVID-19 lockdowns, there was a surge in hiring, with the economy creating an average of 400,000 jobs per month.
The unemployment rate, though still modest by historical standards, has risen since reaching a 54-year low of 3.4% in April 2023.
The increasing use of artificial intelligence and other technologies is further increasing uncertainty that could reduce demand for workers.
“What we’ve seen is that a lot of the businesses we support are stuck in that stagnant state: ‘Are we going to hire or not? What can we automate? What do we need a human touch for?'” said Matt Hobby, vice president of staffing firm HealthSkills in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“We’re in the Lehigh Valley, which is a big transportation hub in eastern Pennsylvania. We’ve seen some cooling in the logistics and transportation markets, particularly because we’ve seen automation in those areas, robotics.”
Concerns about the job market were enough to prompt the Fed to cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point last week for the third time this year.
But three Fed officials refused to move, the largest dissent in six years. Some Fed officials are holding out on further cuts while inflation remains above the central bank’s 2% target. Two voted to keep the rate unchanged. (Stephen Miron, a Trump appointee to the Fed’s governing board in September, voted for the big cut — in line with the president’s demands.)
fed chair jerome powell Last week’s rate cut followed warnings that the job market was weaker than it appeared.
The economy has added less than 40,000 jobs per month since April, government data shows. But that also overstates the pace of hiring, Powell said. He suspects the amendments could reduce payrolls by as much as 60,000 per month, which would mean employers are not adding jobs at all; Instead, they have been cutting by 20,000 per month since the spring. “This is a labor market with significant downside risks,” Powell told reporters.
Due to the government shutdown, the Labor Department did not release its jobs report for September, October and November on time.
It finally released the September jobs report on November 20, seven weeks late. It will publish some October data — including a count of jobs created that month by businesses, nonprofits and government agencies — along with the November report on Tuesday. But it won’t release the unemployment rate for October because it couldn’t calculate the numbers during the shutdown.
October data is expected to show a big decline in US government jobs, reflecting the delayed impact of billionaire Elon Musk’s removal from the federal workforce as head of the Department for Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Analysts at Evercore ISI, a research organization, said in a note last week that about 150,000 federal employees agreed to take buyouts under pressure from DOGE — and when the 2025 fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 100,000 left the government, leading to October pay cuts. The remaining 50,000 stayed for the remainder of the calendar year and their departure will likely be reflected in the January 2026 jobs report.