Headline US hiring slowed last month from March’s brisk pace, but nevertheless managed to double estimates in Friday’s closely-watched jobs report.
The BLS’s establishment survey showed a 115,000-job gain for April, almost twice the 65,000 print consensus expected. This marks the first time the NFP headline has registered consecutive gains since “Liberation Day.”
The prior month’s headline, already the best of Donald Trump’s second term, was revised to show an even larger, 185,000 net addition. That was offset by an outsized downward adjustment to February’s tally, which now reflects a 156,000-job loss.
February’s revision weighed on the three-month average, which slipped below 50,000 as January’s 160,000 print dropped from the lookback, replaced by April’s lower headline.
The two-month average (I’d gently note that two is the second-smallest possible “n”) is now 150,000, the best since Joe Biden’s last month in the Oval Office.
Private hiring registered a 123,000 gain, better than ADP’s tally (which was the highest for any month of “Trump 2.0”) and far ahead of the 73,000 consensus.
By sector, gains were concentrated in health care, social assistance, transportation and warehousing. No surprises there. Nor was it surprising to see federal government payrolls shrink again.
Notably in the context of “AI replacement” worries fanned by the latest Challenger job cuts update, information shed another 13,000 jobs across telecom, movie production, computing infrastructure, data processing and web hosting.
Since the pandemic boom peak in November of 2022, employment in information’s down by nearly 350,000.
Note that big-cap tech (or “tech,” with scare quotes, to account for classification nuances among the Magnificent 7) was under immense shareholder pressure to trim the proverbial fat in late 2022. Then came the AI arms race.
The all-time high for total employment in the information sector was recorded in March of 2001, at the height of the dot-com boom.
On the household survey side of Friday’s release, the unemployment rate rose to an unrounded 4.337% from 4.256% in March. The participation rate moved down yet again. At 61.8%, it’s the lowest since October of 2021.
Total employment on the household survey fell 226,000. That brings the four-month drop to — checks notes — 1.37 million. (Thank God no one cares about or trades that series.)
All in all, this’ll be treated (and likely traded) as a pretty solid read on the US labor market, particularly considering the upbeat message from ADP, JOLTs and claims.
Another data release which increases my curiosity as to how much of the hiring in construction and healthcare partly reflects legal US people being hired to replace off-the-books illegals who have been deported or just left.
Not so long ago, construction sites were heavily staffed by those immigrants, especially in Florida, Arizona and SoCal. Both day laborers and skilled trades. Then consider eldercare where it has been estimated that just over a third of providers are non-native born.
So I suspect that part of the hiring numbers reported in those two categories reflect the hiring of citizens to replace illegal immigrants who worked off of the books and may not have been counted in official statistics?
Not that it matters! How about that VIX?
As I mused when I first posted about this, it only matters if it seriously impacts profit margins. (If earnings matter ~~)
JL responded by mentioning the trucking industry where the purge of foreign-born drivers has worsened an already tight market for drivers. So we have a potential earlier indicator to watch.