{"id":718,"date":"2026-06-18T22:12:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T22:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=718"},"modified":"2026-06-18T22:12:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T22:12:56","slug":"the-job-market-is-thawing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=718","title":{"rendered":"The Job Market Is Thawing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more The Black Soldiers who Changed the Meaning of the Civil War<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries\u2014just don\u2019t call it a boom.<\/p>\n

Last year, America\u2019s job market was trapped in what my colleague Rog\u00e9 Karma described as the Big Freeze. Unemployment was low\u2014people who wanted jobs largely had them\u2014but finding new <\/i>work was difficult: The hiring rate was as slow as it had been since the start of the pandemic. Now we\u2019re in something like a spring thaw. Employers have added, on average, 114,000 jobs a month this year. Compared with 2025, when the average was just 10,000 a month, the number represents a notable reversal. But this is moderate growth, not a radical expansion, and hiring is just one metric of many for determining the health of the economy. Think of these changes as a cautious transition into a new phase.<\/p>\n

The great hiring slowdown of 2025 had a few possible explanations. When President Trump returned to office in January, his government immediately stepped up immigration enforcement, deporting hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the calendar year. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that net migration\u2014that is, arrivals minus departures\u2014was 410,000 last year, about one-fifth of what it was projected to be before Trump\u2019s return, although the Brookings Institution estimates that the true number could be much lower. Fewer new people in the country means fewer people looking for work. That could explain why, despite the fact that fewer new jobs were being created, unemployment stayed relatively low last year: 4.3 percent. The sudden arrival and eventual retraction of aggressive new tariff policies may have also played a role in last year\u2019s sluggish hiring numbers. Broadly, employers seemed to be \u201cmonitoring the situation\u201d: tracking the decisions of an unpredictable president, and waiting for the right time to shell out for new workers.<\/p>\n

The labor market now seems to have shrugged off some of that decision paralysis. Remarkably, unemployment has been under 5 percent for about five years. And though the labor market isn\u2019t quite as strong as it was during the post-COVID economic snapback of 2021 through early 2023, the latest hiring numbers have been unequivocal: Employers added 172,000 new jobs in May across a variety of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, local government, construction, manufacturing, and health care. Until recently, a large proportion of the few jobs being added each month were in the health care industry. \u201cThere was no game in town other than health care in 2025,\u201d Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG US, told me. Health care continues to add new jobs at a steady rate, thanks in part to an aging population\u2019s consistent need for it, but it\u2019s not the only important player in today\u2019s job market.<\/p>\n

Analysts have theories as to why this might be happening, but understanding why the labor market behaves the way it does inevitably involves some guesswork, in part because the Bureau of Labor Statistics is constantly publishing revisions to old data. Experts hesitate to talk about job-growth expectations in absolutes. One explanation for the spate of recent hires, the economics journalist and analyst Matthew C. Klein told me, is that the force of the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown on the hirers has \u201cbottomed out.\u201d Deportations are clearly still happening at high levels, but the fact that the country\u2019s growth rate has picked up a little could be enough to overcome some of that negative pressure on new hires. (The government\u2019s monthly employment surveys don\u2019t distinguish between hires with and without temporary visas, making it difficult to know the exact role that immigrant workers may have played in the recent growth.)<\/p>\n

Another possibility is that businesses are starting to feel the effects of the tax breaks enacted in last year\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and therefore have more money to spend on personnel. Enthusiasm around AI\u2014which has continued to evolve at an astonishing pace, shrugging off some critics\u2019 concerns of a bubble\u2014could also have something to do with it. And last year\u2019s tariff whiplash has largely subsided, in part thanks to the Supreme Court\u2019s February ruling against the president\u2019s approach. Businesses now have \u201ca lot more certainty\u201d about what the future holds,Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, told me.<\/p>\n

Will job growth continue at this clip? With Trump signaling that the war in Iran is about to end, energy prices have been falling, which could give some employers the confidence (and the cash) to keep hiring. \u201cI don\u2019t see anything on the horizon that would make me worried about the job market,\u201d Berger told me. \u201cEspecially if gas prices are off the table, there\u2019s no active<\/i> risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans are largely unhappy with the president\u2019s stewardship of the economy, and last month\u2019s employment data handed him a much-needed political win. \u201cIT\u2019S RAINING JOBS,\u201d Trump posted earlier this month. This is ironic, given his history of describing BLS data as \u201cfaked\u201d and \u201crigged\u201d\u2014clearly, he\u2019s happy to trust the federal data when they work in his favor. Ultimately, though, these numbers are more like a course correction, a return to some semblance of normalcy after the hangover of a post-COVID hiring spree. They are not in and of themselves evidence that the United States is in a \u201cgolden age,\u201d as Trump likes to say.<\/p>\n

Read more The Left-Wing Case Against Antizionism<\/a><\/p>\n

Although the stock market continues to smash through record highs, research suggests that consumer sentiment\u2014how confident people feel about their own finances and about the economy\u2014is abysmal. Inflation is surging faster than it has in years, and hourly wages are growing relatively slowly. Conscious of the risk that inflation might stick, the Fed\u2019s policy-setting arm signaled yesterday that interest rates could rise in the future. (Rates will remain unchanged for now.) That employers are tentatively starting to hire again is an important signal\u2014but it\u2019s only one part of the story.<\/p>\n

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