WASHINGTON – Signals of labor market weakness go beyond the headline numbers that prompted President Donald Trump to fire the government’s head statistician last week.
The jobs report released Friday showed a slowdown in hiring, a slight uptick in the national unemployment rate, and a few other clues that the economy is softening — including an increase in long-term unemployment.
The number of people jobless for six months or more increased from 1.6 million to 1.8 million in July, representing 24% of the unemployed. It’s the most people experiencing long-term joblessness since the end of 2021 and the highest percentage since February 2022, when the economy was still recovering from coronavirus lockdowns.
Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the modest rise in long-term joblessness could reflect employers getting pickier about hiring as President Donald Trump’s tariff regime changes the cost of doing business.
“People who have been unemployed for longer have clearly had some challenges in getting back into the labor market,” Wilson told HuffPost. “I think that as things have softened, and employers are facing more uncertainty given the sort of chaotic nature of economic policy in this country, that it would be harder for those people to find new jobs.”
