On one side, there are the tech layoff announcements, often to clean up what tech CEOs widely called “over-hiring” to describe what they’d done in 2020-2022, when their payrolls exploded; Block CEO Jack Dorsey was thelatest on X, “yes we over-hired during covid…,” after Block announced that it would lay off nearly half its staff, which had more than tripled in 2020-2022 (from 3,900 to 12,500).
At the same time, there is helter-skelter hiring for AI-related jobs with huge compensation offers leading to what’s locally called a “mansion shortage” in AI epicenter San Francisco.
And there is very tepid hiring in other parts of the private sector, accompanied by massive layoffs at the federal government, and job reductions at state governments.
These currents come amid a crackdown on illegal immigration and the tightening up of some legal immigration that have led to adrop in the total supply of labor.
This is not a labor market the US is used to. It’s a labor market of low unemploymentdespitelow job creation in the private sector and job destruction at the federal government.
Job creation in the private sector is low because there is less demand for labor in some industries, including because AI is being deployed to do things that college graduates entering the labor market would have done, making this job market very difficult to enter for recent graduates.
And job creation is also low because of labor shortages in other industries, such as skilled labor in the trades, including those needed in construction, which has started a whole discussion of how it would have been better for some young people, instead of going to college and loading up on student loans, to go to trade school and then train to be auto technicians or electricians or HVAC technicians or carpenters or welders.
The latest piece of the puzzle in these countercurrents: The four-week average of initial applications for unemployment insurance benefits in the week through Saturday ticked down to 210,
সূত্র: Wolf Street
ক্যাটাগরি: অর্থনীতি ও ব্যবসা