#labor-market

#labor-market

The AIM Index is a survey of more than 140 Massachusetts employers that has run since 1991. It is calculated on a 100-point scale, with 50 as neutral; a reading above 50 is positive, while below 50 is negative. The state's March rating was 47, down from 52 in February.

"It's a brutal job market. To see that 3.1% hiring rate, the lowest since April 2020, underscores how little hiring is going on."

It has become increasingly clear how great the challenges are in implementing the directive in a national context, both for us in Sweden and in other EU countries. Therefore, a relaunch at EU level is needed and we are now taking the initiative to do so.

AI washing has gained traction as emerging data on the tech's impact on the labor market tells a muddied, inconclusive story about how the technology is or will destroy human jobs-or if it has yet to touch them. A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that of thousands of surveyed C-suite executives across the U.S., UK, Germany and Australia, nearly 90% said AI had no impact on workplace employment over the last three years following the late-2022 release of ChatGPT.

the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show student loan and auto loan balances at record highs, while credit card balances have climbed to about $1.2 trillion. Delinquencies, particularly on credit cards, are also rising, with 90-day-plus late-payment rates for credit cards more than 12% higher than in prior years. Consumers are driving a lot of growth, but there are some signs of weakness for certain parts of the economy, Kan said, adding that these pressures could spill over into housing and mortgage performance.

and it appears that the job-hopping hack is unwinding.ADP's latest data suggests that there are now only a couple of industries where competition between employers results in better pay: industries where demand for skilled labor outweighs supply. A pay trends report shared with Fortune yesterday from the private payroll company showed that in January, year-over-year pay growth for job-hoppers slowed to 6.4%, down from 6.6% in December.

Most American dairy cows are milked by immigrants. On Dale Hemminger's farm in upstate New York, the cows are milked by robots. When a cow wants to be milked, it walks up to a machine that cleans its udder, attaches cups to its teats, draws the milk and dispenses a treat. In a barn that Hemminger plans to open this year, other robots will roam the floor like little automated pooper scoopers, picking up manure.

On Wednesday, the government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate fell to a still-low 4.3% from 4.4%. However, government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands. That reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, a third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.

Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009's Great Recession. The data comes from Challenger, Gray & Christmas' new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires were announced-the lowest total on record for January.

And beneath the official jobs data is a growing accessibility crisis. More and more job seekers are finding themselves shut out of the labor market - not because there are no jobs to be had, but because torrents of AI slop are crowding them out of consideration. Case in point: a few months back, tech publication The Markup posted an opening for an engineer role.

Economist Claudia Sahm is an expert (if not the expert) on the conditions that presage a recession and how policymakers should react as a result. She is the creator of "the Sahm Rule," an employment indicator monitored by everyone from central banks to the global financial giants. The Sahm Rule says that a recession is likely when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more, relative to the minimum of the three-month averages from the previous year.

There has been a lot of coverage of the jobs that might disappear due to agentic artificial intelligence-the technology which learns about your business from the data you feed it and then undertakes many of the tasks itself. Less prominent is the story of the jobs that will, and are already, being created. "In the near term, AI is creating more jobs than it is replacing," reads an against-the-grain report by LinkedIn, the social media and employment platform. We should all give thanks for that.