On MS NOW’s Morning Joe, Steve Rattner unpacks the data behind Trump’s weakening labor market, particularly for blue-collar men and college grads.
Poll after poll makes clear that Americans are hugely dissatisfied with the state of the economy. While inflation and affordability generally top the list of grievances, a flagging job market – particularly for new entrants – is another major source of discontent.
For starters, the rate of job creation has declined sharply over the past 16 months. In 2024, for example, the economy added an average of 122,000 jobs a month, above the number needed to take account of increases in the size of the labor force. By the end of 2024, the unemployment rate was down to 4.1%. But since the beginning of 2025, the average number of additional workers employed each month has fallen to just 26,000, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 4.3% from 4.1% in December 2024. In six of those 16 months, the economy shed jobs.
As a consequence, the balance between job openings and job seekers has shifted dramatically. For several years after the economy reopened following the Covid shutdown, the number of jobs available was substantially higher than the number of Americans seeking employment. At the peak in 2022, there were two open jobs for every American looking for one. But as the number of available jobs began to fall in early 2025, that balance swung the other way. By March of this year, there were 6.9 million available jobs but 7.2 million people looking for one.
Men have been disproportionately impacted by the changes in the job market. Over the same 16 months, the number of employed men has fallen by 155,000 while the number of women at work has risen by 559,000. That’s a reversal of the preponderance of history, when men typically captured the majority of new employment.
That has occurred in large part because women have higher educational attainment and are more heavily represented in fast growing service sectors of the economy. The sector most responsible for job growth in recent years has been healthcare, where women make up 78% of the employment base. At the other extreme, job growth has been particularly weak in manufacturing, transportation, mining and oil & gas. (Construction is the only male dominated sector that has added jobs.)
Another particularly hard-hit group has been young Americans. Until the pandemic, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates was below the national average. Now those newly minted graduates have a higher jobless rate – and the gap is widening. This 1.4 percentage point gap (5.6% versus 4.2%) has not only been growing, it is the largest it has been since at least 1990.
That makes for a tough job market for new entrants. As recently as 2022, there were just over 100 applicants for each entry level job opening. As the labor market has loosened, that has steadily increased and last year reached 300 applicants per available job. Moreover, as the impact of artificial intelligence begins to be felt, it appears that the job market for white collar entrants is at least as difficult as for those further down the economic ladder.
