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Friday Nov 21 2025 00:00
2 min
The US labor market in 2025 was once described as stagnant. While statistics showed stable layoffs and low unemployment rates by historical standards, finding a job was proving to be a significant challenge for job seekers.
This fall, major companies like Amazon, Verizon, and Target announced a series of layoffs, raising questions about the stability of the labor market. Economists are closely monitoring this trend.
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, states, "All signs suggest that we are moving from a labor market characterized by 'no hiring and no layoffs' to one that 'doesn't hire and starts to lay off'."
The first official unemployment rate report since August will be released tonight. Due to the government shutdown, this jobs report will only cover September data, reflecting the situation before the significant increase in layoff announcements. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, October was the worst month for planned layoffs since 2003.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, WARN notices, which large companies must issue before large-scale layoffs, saw a significant increase last month in 21 states, reaching 39,006, one of the highest levels since records began in 2006. (This figure is still lower than the levels of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Great Recession period, and May of this year.)
Robert Shimer, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, suggests that current data from private sources indicates that the labor market is experiencing "very slow or stagnant growth," supporting the idea of "no hiring and no layoffs."
The lack of hiring in the economy may be the most serious consequence: Shimer's study suggests that "fluctuations in the unemployment rate are mainly driven by companies not hiring significantly, and unemployed workers remaining unemployed for a long time, not specifically due to the significant increase in layoffs."
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