It was the week before Christmas, and Americans got one more dispiriting look at the job market.
After a year of stalled hiring and “ghost jobs,” Americans are going back to school, retraining, and trying to get off the sidelines. But they’ve been flying blind after the longest federal government shutdown in history clouded the picture on job growth and unemployment. Finally, the October and November figures confirmed what most of them seem to feel already: The labor market has no room for them.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, the highest since 2021. But this isn’t a standard recession: The BLS isn’t seeing layoffs happen as much in the private sector. Instead, it continues to see a virtual hiring freeze, two-thirds of a year after the bottom fell out of employment growth in April.
Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial, wrote in a note the jump in unemployment reflects a “transformation” in the labor force. Rather than unemployment being driven by layoffs, he said, “it was driven by an increase of individuals formerly not in the labor force.” In other words, people who had been without work for so long they weren’t considered to be in the labor force started looking during the holiday, and didn’t find any takers.
