Just this week, UPS revealed its plans to let go of 12,000 workers. A number of tech companies, from PayPal and Salesforce to Google and Microsoft, have cut thousands of jobs in January. The retail sector hasn’t been spared either, with Wayfair and eBay trimming headcount.
But despite this steady drip of layoffs, the latest jobs report indicates that the labor market is still going strong. According to the report, which was released this morning, employers added 353,000 new jobs in January—job growth that actually exceeded expectations. (The Dow Jones estimate leading up to the jobs report had put the number closer to 185,000.) The unemployment rate also remained unchanged at 3.7%, and labor participation continued to hover around 62.5%.
The job gains were not specific to any one sector, with “professional and business services” leading the pack with 74,000 new jobs and other major additions spread across healthcare and retail. Continuing a trend from previous months, women seem to be partly responsible for these job gains, as their employment rates have inched up steadily.
There were also revisions to some of the figures from the December jobs report—namely in job growth, which jumped up to 333,000 from 216,000. Overall figures for 2023 were also revised, bringing the tally to 3.1 million new jobs over the course of the year.
Even economists have been surprised by the labor market’s resilience since the worst of the pandemic; many of them had predicted last year that hiring would slow and unemployment would increase. The jobs report also seems to reiterate that while layoffs in industries like tech draw headlines, they only account for a fraction of the overall job market and don’t necessarily reflect broader trends across the economy.
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