A closely watched report on US jobs released on Friday gave signs of a cooling labor market.
The economy added just 22,000 new jobs in August, coming in below expectations, while the unemployment rate ticked slightly up to 4.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the beginning of the year, more than 100,000 jobs were being added each month.
Amid Donald Trump’s trade wars, tariffs have now been put on most foreign goods and prices have started going up. Uncertainty seems to have spooked businesses and this combination of a slowing jobs market and higher inflation paints a murky picture of the US economy.
Here’s what we learned with Friday’s report:
Negative job numbers for the first time since 2020
Friday’s job report included revisions to initial reports for June and July. The pace of hiring in June was initially reported as 139,000 jobs added to the economy, but revisions now put the actual figure at -13,000. This is the first time the labor market lost jobs since December 2020, during the massive unemployment seen during the pandemic. July’s numbers were revised up by 6,000, from 73,000 to 79,000.
Revisions, a standard part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data collection, became a marked point of tension between the bureau and the White House after the bureau dramatically revised numbers in last month’s report.
Initial figures overestimated the number of jobs in May and June by 258,000, which the bureau said was the result of receiving additional reports – the bureau collects its data by surveying employers – from businesses and government agencies. With the new revisions released on Friday, total revisions covering May, June and July revised figures down by a combined 279,000 for those three months.
Last month, Trump fired the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, after the revision, saying the numbers were “rigged” to make him and Republicans look bad. But economists point out that the bureau is made up of career statisticians, many of whom have been with the bureau for many years.
Job losses were seen in federal employment and manufacturing
The impacts of the “department of government efficiency” are still being felt even though Elon Musk has largely stepped away from his role in Trump’s White House. In August, federal employment went down another 15,000 jobs, bringing the total number of federal job cuts to 97,000 since January.
Manufacturing jobs have also taken a hit this year, down 12,000 jobs in August and 78,000 over the last year.
Job growths were seen in healthcare and social assistance industries, which saw increases of 31,000 and 16,000 jobs, respectively.
Unemployment among Black Americans has jumped
In August, the unemployment rate for Black Americans jumped 0.3% over the last month to 7.5% – over double the unemployment rate for white and Asian Americans, which are just over 3.5%. The unemployment rate for Hispanic Americans was also higher, at 5.3%.
Though the overall unemployment rate went up just 0.1% over the last year, the Black unemployment rate jumped 1.4%. The unemployment rate for white and Asian Americans actually went down slightly compared with last year.
It’s been a longtime trend that Black Americans are the “last hired, first fired” in an economic downturn, meaning they are the first to feel the impacts of a downturn and the last to recover from one. This was seen during the Great Recession, in which unemployment hit Black and Hispanic Americans disproportionately.
Federal Reserve will probably cut interest rates in September
Fed officials have been signaling that a rate cut could come at the Fed’s next board meeting on 16 and 17 September, though it probably won’t be a drastic cut. Investors seem to have found hope in last month’s Jackson Hole speech by the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, in which he implied that officials would probably ease interest rates amid concern about the labor market.
But the Fed cutting rates doesn’t mean it sees stability in the economy. Fed officials, including Powell, have raised concerns about higher prices due to Trump’s tariffs. It remains unclear if inflation will keep going up, or if there will be a one-time price increase from the tariffs.
Powell noted that officials, for now, were more concerned about the labor market, which August’s report confirmed has been experiencing turbulence this summer.
White House urges Americans to trust Trump’s plan
On Thursday, before Friday’s jobs report release, Trump said that “the real numbers” will be reported next year.
“The real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is, but will be in a year from now,” he said. “You’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen.”
When asked about the hiring slump, the national economic council director, Kevin Hassett, told CNBC on Friday that “you are seeing that people are being hired”.
“Members of my family have been hired,” he said. “Both of them started their new jobs about a week ago.”
Hassett called the jobs report “disappointing” but said that the numbers will eventually go back up.
In a separate interview on Friday, the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told CNBC that the jobs reports will be better once the administration makes changes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“You’ll take out the people who are just trying to create noise against the president,” Lutnick said. He added that Americans will see “the greatest growth economy … starting six months from today to a year from today”.
