New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Tuesday continued to show weakness in the American jobs market.<\/p>\n
The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) shows<\/a> that the number of new hires in February decreased to 4.8 million, which was roughly 400,000 fewer hires than were recorded in February 2025.<\/p>\n The report also shows that the US hiring rate in February fell to just 3.1%, which is the lowest rate since April 2020, when the economy was shut down due to the global Covid-19<\/a> pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n The good news in the report is that the number of quits and layoffs remained relatively steady, meaning that people who already have jobs are retaining them at a healthy clip.<\/p>\n But Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted that these bad hiring numbers came before President Donald Trump<\/a> launched an illegal war with Iran, which has since destabilized global energy markets and raised prices for oil<\/a>, gasoline, and diesel fuel.<\/p>\n “This is a hiring recession,” Long wrote<\/a> in a social media<\/a> post. “And Americans are feeling it. There were notable hiring pullbacks in February in hospitality and construction. Bottom line: The job market was already frozen before the war in Iran began. It’s worrying that a ‘no hire, no fire’ situation could turn into a ‘no hire, start to fire’ job market quickly if there isn’t a resolution soon.”<\/p>\n Long’s analysis was echoed by Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at hiring site Indeed, who wrote in a research note flagged<\/a> by Axios that hiring in the US “was stuck in neutral going into this [Iran] conflict,” and “getting it into gear just got harder” thanks to the war.<\/p>\n Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, noted<\/a> that hiring rates in the US hit 3.1% or lower the last two times the country was in a severe recession.<\/p>\n “3.1% is not only comparable to the Covid low point\u2014it’s also comparable to late 2009 and early 2010, when the unemployment<\/a> rate was around 10%,” Berger explained. “Hiring was ice cold in February.”<\/p>\n Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who has been a harsh critic of Trump’s tariffs<\/a>, found<\/a> that the February JOLTS report wiped out an unexpected January increase in manufacturing job openings that the president’s allies attributed to his trade<\/a> policies.<\/p>\n “Alas, the perils of cherry-picking,” Lincicome commented.<\/p>\n The new data on hiring in the US job market comes weeks after a BLS report estimated<\/a> that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. On the whole, the American economy has posted a net loss of jobs since Trump announced his \u201cliberation day\u201d global tariffs<\/a> in April 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Tuesday continued to show weakness in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,54158,101,228242,134,759,247489],"class_list":{"0":"post-557665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cato-institute","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-iran-war","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-tariffs","14":"tag-us-bureau-of-labor-statistics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}