Job losses reveal a shakier labor market

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**Kai Ryssdal** (0:32)
So, about that jobs report. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal. It is Friday today. This one is the 7th of August. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. Disappointing, meager, surprising. All of them words one might use to describe the July unemployment report we got this very morning. We are going to use some more words to figure out what it all means. Katherine Rampel is at MSNOW, also at The Bullwork. David Gurra is at Bloomberg. Hey, you two.
Hey, Kyle. Mr. Gurra, we start with you. 23,000 jobs lost. The negative side of the ledger rate goes to 4.1%. Revisions were down. Kind of feels like we got caught unawares by this thing.

**David Gurra** (1:30)
It does, so wildly away from what was expected by Wall Street. And a few things caught my eye. The first is the participation rate. So this is that measurement of who's looking for work.
And that fell to something like 61%, which is the lowest it's been in many decades if you take COVID out of the equation. The other is wages. I mean, that's something we focused on a lot here. And we see that's kind of setting an historical record as well, slowest pace in more than five years. I think we got this other sense, too, just about how the pool of people working has shrunk. And there's so much to focus on. Maybe we haven't been talking about immigration policy as much, but I think what we saw in Stark Relief today in these numbers is a reflection of the fact that there has been this big deportation campaign. This government has been sending folks who've been here home. And we see that in the numbers today as well. It's a smaller pool of workers as a result of that.

**Kai Ryssdal** (2:19)
We do indeed see it. And for the umpteenth time, immigration policy is a labor market story. Katherine Rampel, labor force participation rate or wages, which is your biggest concern? Or pick another one if you like.

**Katherine Rampell** (2:34)
I mean, they're both concerning for somewhat different reasons. So the labor force participation rate suggests that people are just getting stuck and giving up potentially. And even though the unemployment rate is still relatively low in historical terms, it masks a lot because it means that when people are losing their jobs, they're not churning into new jobs that quickly. Like, it's never fun if you lose your job, obviously. But the pain is normally relatively limited. And when you have a lot of churn in the economy, people churn out of jobs, they churn into jobs. And what we are seeing now is a lot of weakness where you have a huge fraction, I think it's like a quarter of people who are unemployed have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.
And then a lot of the people who are unemployed are just saying, you know what, it's not worth it, I'm dropping out of the labor force altogether. So all of that I think is extremely, extremely concerning.

**Kai Ryssdal** (3:42)
David, can we get back to that immigration thing for a minute? This is a tad weedy and I will count on you to keep us and take me back out of the weeds.
But there's going to come a time with the way immigration is going in this economy that we're not going to need the robust number of jobs that we have needed to keep the unemployment rate reasonably low. And it sort of looks like we are getting there.

**David Gurra** (4:06)
Yeah, I think that this was a real sign of that. And I think that we've kind of been faced with maybe largely anecdotal issue here since the start of the second term, which is, you know, our jobs in this country we have counted on immigrants to do. And if immigrants aren't here to do them, what does that mean more broadly? So look, I think that this once again refocuses attention on that issue. And again, I think that like the way that we have customarily or in recent years looked at the labor market has shifted radically as a result of the fact that we have this, you know, very, very prohibitive policy that's been put in place and enforced by the Trump administration.