Humans aren’t completely redundant just yet. Only those with skills who wear ties to work.

That’s one humorous takeaway from Wednesday’s update on US private sector hiring, which showed firms added 63,000 jobs on net last month, more than economists expected.

February marks the third consecutive monthly gain although, as the figure below reminds you, hiring slowed dramatically beginning early last year, when Donald Trump set about establishing the most draconian US tariff regime in a century.

“We’ve seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for job-stayers,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson remarked.

Now for the bad news. The breakdown by sector painted a mixed picture at best. Construction added 19,000 jobs while education and health services continued to do the heavy lifting with 58,000 additions.

Manufacturing payrolls contracted and, notably, professional and business services shed another 30,000 positions. It was the seventh consecutive monthly contraction in payrolls for that sector, and the ninth in 10.

Over the period highlighted in the figure above, professional and business services has lost 222,000 jobs.

Whether that’s all AI-related I can’t say, but that category includes things like legal work, accounting, coding, consulting, administrative services, document preparation and, ironically in ADP’s case, employment services.

In other words, we’re talking about highly-skilled, white-collar work. That’s just the kind of work many worry Anthropic’s on the way to automating with Claude.

You can draw your own conclusions. In her brief editorial, Richardson also noted that the pay premium for switching jobs fell to just 1.8ppt in February. “With hiring concentrated in only a few sectors” there’s “no widespread pay benefit from changing jobs,” she said.