New York City's Slowing Job Growth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.
Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com.
That's odoo.com.

**Brian Lehrer** (0:41)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to turn now to the national as well as local economy. By the way, former Obama national security official, foreign policy official and speech writer Ben Rhodes. Some of you know him from the Pod Save podcast. He has a really fascinating new book and he's going to be our guest coming up in the segment after this. Ben Rhodes coming up, he took excerpts from speeches from the 250 years of the United States, and we've pulled some from contemporary enough periods that we have the audio and we're going to discuss what Ben Rhodes sees as some of the most meaningful speeches in American history. This is a fascinating book partly because it's not just, this was a great speech and that was a great speech. He's got a thesis about two different kinds of American identity that you can hear in all these different speeches, whether it's Benjamin Franklin or Frederick Douglass or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Those are just four of the actual examples from the book. Ben Rhodes and we'll talk to him about some foreign policy questions as well, since that's his area of expertise from the Obama administration, including how do we end this war with Iran?
That is coming up.
Nice vamp there as we got the next guest connected and ready to go. So now we turn to the national and local economy. The national job numbers on Friday, if you missed this, were surprisingly strong considering the oil shocks, and tariffs, and everything.
Surprisingly strong and kicking so many immigrants out of the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employers added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double what analysts were expecting. That's the third straight month of better than expected results. But New York City isn't really feeling it. The city's job growth is stalling by various measures. There are some other economic concerns too. Locally, the unemployment rate for the city is still 5.6 percent, more than a point above the national rate and higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic at 5.6 percent. The jobs that are being added are disproportionately low wage. Meanwhile, the city actually shed private sector jobs in March, the most recent month for which we have data. We're going to talk about all this with James Parrott, Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. He's been studying these trends closely for many years. James, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks for joining us.

**James Parrott** (3:34)
Thank you, Brian. Good to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:36)
Listeners, you can help us report this story, particularly about the New York City economy. What are you seeing? What are you feeling? What are you worried about if you're navigating jobs landscape in any way?
212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Can we talk about the national numbers first, James?

**James Parrott** (3:59)
Sure.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:00)
What I'm seeing, which I mentioned in the intro, if there are fewer immigrants to even take jobs because there's so much deportation. If companies are hurting because of the price of oil going up and all the ripple effects on companies' bottom lines.
If those things are happening plus the pressure from the tariffs that we've been talking about for more than a year, why is there so much hiring in America?

**James Parrott** (4:35)
Well, it's possible we're going to see some of that in revised numbers that we get in a couple of weeks for March and April in New York City and we'll get the data for May. I'm not sure that I would agree with the characterization that job growth is really weak in New York. It's less than what it was a couple of years ago, but that's because we were adding a lot of jobs because of the bounce back from the pandemic and then there was a slowdown related to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates and so on.
Fundamentally, I think the reason for the strength in the labor market that we saw recently is because corporate profits have been really strong at the end of last year and in the first quarter of this year. And for the first several months of President Trump's administration, he had such erratic economic policy moves with tariffs up and down, and just an erratic approach to policy overall, I think that it created heightened uncertainty. But what seems to be the case now, even with what's happening in the Middle East with the Iran War, is that businesses, seeing this strong profitability, market sort of loves corporate profits being up, so the market indexes have been very high, is that people are moving on, and they're sort of getting back to business as before, hiring, seeking to not miss out on some economic rebound that's taking place.