Now Comes A Labor Market Hard Stop—No More Government Jobs, No More Foreign-Born Workers

Another Jobs Friday report and still more of the same old, same old from the BLS. There were allegedly 143,000 new jobs created in January, and, as usual, fully 92% of them were in the lowest productivity sectors of the US economy:

Establishment Survey Job Gains In January 2025:

• Healthcare/social assistance: +66,000

• Retail: +34,000.

• Government: +32,000.

• All other: +11,000.

• Total jobs: +143,000.

• Health/Retail/Government % of Total: 92%

Also, unsurprisingly, there was not a lot of good news among the meager gains in the “all other” category, which accounts for upwards of 98 million payroll jobs. Even if you annualize the January gain, it would amount to a mere 0.1% increase in employment in this vast swath of the labor force.

Furthermore, most of the high productivity industries within this 98 million labor market sector either lost jobs in January or treaded water.

Distribution of January’s 11,000 Job Gain in “All Other”

• Professional and business: -11,000.

• Energy/mining/logging: -7,000.

• Construction: +4,000.

• Manufacturing: +3,000.

• Transportation & Warehousing: +1,000.

• Other: +21,000.

• Net Gain, all other: +11,000

Then again, these are the monthly change numbers, which should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the BLS also saw fit to revise downward the previously reported numbers for the last 12 months by an average of 589,000 jobs!

That’s right. Compared to the usual Jobs Friday excitement when these monthly numbers were first published, here is the BLS’s confession as to the difference between what its goal-seeked monthly “model” ginned up versus what actually happened out in the US labor market. That is, once the BLS got the actual state-by-state job numbers from the unemployment insurance system, which numbers come in with a lag of several quarters.

The latter, of course, are are based on the profound desire of tens of millions of US businesses to not report phantom jobs or pay mandatory UI taxes on even one more worker than they actually have punching the clock. As a consequence, in the 10 monthly reports prior to the November election the BLS’s goal-seeked model reported 337,000 job gains that didn’t happen in the real world (final column on the right)