The U.S. job market hasn’t collapsed, but is no longer overheating, snapping back, or even cooling in a conventional sense. It’s simply stuck.
When a delayed jobs report finally dropped Tuesday, economists and investors got their first real look under the hood of the U.S. labor market, and the engine is stalled. Payroll growth was modest in November at 64,000, while October showed a net decline of roughly 105,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate rose to a four-year high of 4.6%. Payroll growth hasn’t collapsed, but it hasn’t meaningfully advanced, either. The result is a labor market that’s drifting sideways, quietly losing momentum beneath the surface.
Economists say that kind of stall is more dangerous than it looks.
“There’s just no forward motion,” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told Fortune. Job gains bounce slightly from month to month, but net hiring has gone essentially nowhere this year, he said, leaving the labor market “stuck in the mud.”
That stagnation explains why unemployment has continued to rise despite weak labor-force growth. Typically, joblessness climbs when layoffs surge or hiring freezes abruptly. This time, with neither happening, the economy has instead been failing a weaker benchmark, unable to create enough jobs just to absorb even modest population growth.
