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WASHINGTON (AP) — The American job market continues to show surprising strength — good news for President Donald Trump who has taken a beating in the polls over the surging gasoline prices that followed U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.Employers added 172,000 jobs in May – roughly double what forecasters had expected – and the unemployment rate remained at a low 4.3%, the Labor Department reported Friday. Job growth was down slightly last month from a revised 179,000 in April. Hiring has bounced back this year from a miserable 2025, showing resilience in the face of economic uncertainty and painfully high energy prices since the Iran war started in late February.The job gains are broad-based. Local governments added 55,000 workers, restaurants and bars 48,000, healthcare companies 35,000. In...

ToplineJanuary was the worst start to a year for job cuts in the United States since 2009, with high-profile layoffs at UPS and Amazon fueling a tumultuous beginning to 2026 on the labor market, according to a private firm’s report, as official government reports remain delayed.There were 108,000 job cuts in January, the most in a January since 2009. Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.Key FactsThe 108,435 job cuts last month represented a 118% jump from the same period last year and the most in any January since 2009, when the U.S. was reeling from the Great Recession triggered by a housing market crisis, consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in its latest monthly report.The decline comes after previous signs of a stabilizing labor market in December, when 35,553 layoffs marked the lowest total since July 2024. It suggests most of the January layoffs were set in motion in 2025, “signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook...

Don’t Confuse Financially Driven Layoffs With AI Layoffs There’s a common impression — among leaders, in the media, and among employees — that AI is already causing widespread unemployment. After all, the US saw well over a million jobs lost to layoffs in 2025. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff attributed some of his company’s layoffs to internal use of its own AI solutions. And if you walked down the streets of San Francisco, you probably saw Artisan’s controversial urban advertisements broadcasting the message “Stop Hiring Humans.” But here’s the dirty little secret of AI and layoffs. Every week, we speak to clients telling some version of the following story: “Our CEO said we’re laying off 20% of staff and replacing them with AI — how do we do that?” When we ask if they have a mature, vetted AI app ready to fill in those jobs, nine out of 10 times, the answer is no — and they haven’t even started. So most...

S&P 500 futures were up 0.32% this morning after the index closed flat yesterday at 6,941. Investors seem to be buoyed by the strong job-market numbers published yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With unemployment falling from 4.4% to 4.3%, many Wall Street analysts are saying that this means the U.S. Federal Reserve is now less likely to cut interest rates further. If the economy is doing just fine, there’s no need to risk inflation by delivering still more cheaper money, the theory goes.Some of them think the labor market is now so tight that the Fed may even raise rates (a scenario likely to provoke rage from President Donald Trump). But, as always, the devil is in the details. A couple of analysts are worried that the latest number might be wrong, and that the level of job creation in the U.S. is lower than the stats suggest.First, the number of jobs added in January—130,000—was roughly double analysts’...

The US economy added 178,000 jobs in March, soaring past expectations, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.3%. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected a gain of 65,000 jobs, reversing February's drop. That month's loss grew even bigger with revisions: from 92,000 to a new figure in Friday's report of 133,000. Economists had projected no change in the unemployment rate from February's 4.4%. Friday's data offers a picture of the job market just as the US-Israel war on Iran began to weigh on an economy already slogging through a weak hiring rate. Read more about the state of the US jobs market. While overall job growth...

The U.S. economy lost jobs in February, a month marred by severe winter weather and a strike at a major health-care provider, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.Nonfarm payrolls fell by 92,000 for the month, compared with the estimate for 50,000 and below the downwardly revised January total of 126,000. February marked the third time in the past five months that payrolls declined, following a sharp revision showing a drop of 17,000 in December.At the same time, the unemployment rate edged higher to 4.4% as jobs declined across key areas. A broader measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons moved lower, to 7.9% or 0.2 percentage point below the January level.Health care, the primary growth driver in payrolls for at least the past year, saw a loss of 28,000, due largely to a strike at Kaiser Permanente that sidelined more than 30,000 workers in Hawaii and California. Though the strike has...

Global advisor to CEOs and corporate boards Ram Charan joins ‘Mornings with Maria’ to discuss AIs impact on jobs and productivity and the biggest threats facing CEOs as supply chain and geopolitical risks grow. The U.S. economy added jobs at a steady pace in June despite headwinds caused by elevated inflation and uncertainty over the Iran war's economic impact. What are the key findings of the June 2026 jobs report?The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday reported that employers added 57,000 jobs in June. That figure was below the estimate of economists polled by LSEG, who estimated 110,000 jobs added. The unemployment rate dipped to 4.2%, which was also below the estimate of 4.3%. The U.S. economy added jobs at a slower pace than expected in June. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Revisions were made to the payroll numbers for the prior two months, with April revised down by 31,000 from a gain of 179,000 to 148,000; while...

Over the next two to three years, 50% to 55% of jobs in the US will be reshaped by AI. For many employees, this will mean that they retain the same or a similar role but face radically new expectations for how they work and what they produce. For company leaders, it will require a clear vision for how the transformation is managed, including a scaled, strategic approach to upskilling and reskilling and the restructuring of career ladders.This shift is already happening—and will pick up speed as AI adoption spreads. Our analysis, based on microeconomic modeling, identified a significant swath of the labor force for which AI will meaningfully augment current roles. Moreover, when the productivity gains from AI use trigger increased end product demand and the potential for augmentation is high, we believe there will be a need for more and, in some cases, new human roles. (See Exhibit 1.) While job augmentation and new-job creation will happen rapidly,...

00:00 Speaker A Once again, this is breaking news for the June Jobs report. The numbers just crossing the wire. 57,000 jobs were added to the US economy in the month of June. That's far less than the 113,000 that economists had forecasted based upon Bloomberg estimates. 00:15 Speaker A Also, we have average hourly earnings for the month of June coming in line with estimates at 3.5% and unemployment actually coming in a tick lower than what economists had forecasted at 4.2%. Economists had expected it at 4.3%. 00:27 Speaker A And so ultimately what we're seeing here is less jobs added to the US economy during the month of June than expected. Also taking a look at the month of May, previously the government had reported that 172,000...