Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
299 comments
·July 2, 2025psunavy03
ajmurmann
We have good metrics. The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.
Your scenario would be called out by median household income, or better median disposable household income. Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Workforce participation also can be valuable instead of or in addition to unemployment numbers, since you fall out of the count once unemployment benefits expire. However, we need to look at it by age bracket. Lower workforce participation between 20 and 60 is probably bad whereas higher workforce participation over 60 might also be bad.
IMO the problem isn't that the metrics aren't there but that the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look. That every discussion of these numbers on social media has a substantial portion of people not understand the difference between median and mean certainly doesn't give me confidence this will ever improve.
Sohcahtoa82
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Absolutely not.
If corporate revenue increases, but wages stay the same, GDP per capita goes up, yet the workers aren't any better off. All that extra money is being absorbed by the ones at the top.
Median disposable household income is probably the best measure.
darth_avocado
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
If I used to make $78k as a full time IT employee, but now have to work two jobs to make $78k, I still have same household income but I’m considerably worse than before.
A combination of hours worked, wages earned and household debt together would paint a much more accurate picture.
csallen
Ironically, you're proving the person you're responding to right: The problem is trying to get a holistic view by focusing on one metric in isolation.
You need to consider multiple metrics. Any one metric by itself is going to have holes.
JumpCrisscross
> Median disposable household income is probably the best measure
Median disposable income won’t meaningfully capture OP’s case of losing a high-paying job and having it replaced by a low-paying one. For that you need to look at the distribution of household disposable income.
We have terrific economic metrics in America. It really should be part of a mandatory civics class to learn how to read them.
jltsiren
Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out earlier.
dmix
That's an extremely simplistic view of our economics works.
NickC25
Also a great measure is the money supply & velocity chart - the M2.
If GDP goes up and the velocity of money drops, it means that real economic gains are not being realized by those who actually spend the majority of their income versus saving it.
Not that there's anything wrong with saving money - it's just that the more money that is being spent regularly, the healthier the entire economy is. Generally.
SR2Z
If a software engineer starts working at Applebees, GDP will decrease. If lots of software engineers do it, GDP decreases more.
If corporate revenue increases and is spent (as most revenue is), then the workers will be better off in the most bland "raising all boats" sense of the word - there will be more competition for their labor and more opportunities for them to jump ship.
GDP gets a bad rap but if I had to pick a single metric, that's the one I'd choose.
standardUser
For that we have the Gini coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
layoric
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
I think the following joke encapsulates the problem with GDP pretty well..
---
Two economists go for a walk in the forest, and having a competitive nature, the first economist sees a pile of bear shit and says to the second "I'll give you $100 to eat that bear shit". The second economist, being one that generally does anything for money, eats the bear shit, takes the $100 and they continue on their walk. The second economist wants to get back at the first, sees another pile of bear shit and says "I dare YOU to eat that bear shit for $100" thinking no way they will actually do it. Not wanting to be outdone by the second economist, the first also eats the bear shit and takes $100.
After walking a bit further, the second economist stops and says to the first "Wait.. did we just both eat shit for nothing??" to which the first replies "No of course not, that would be crazy.. we increased GDP by $200".
---
I can't remember the source of the joke but been around for a while and I may have butchered some of the original details.
pzo
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
GDP or even GDP per capita is not the best metric. You can sell 100 iphones for $1000 or sell 500 cheap androids for $200 and both countries will have same GDP but I think output and outcome is much better in latter case (you produced 5x more products and 5x more people can benefits and be more productive with those 'tools'). Sure iphone for $1000 is better than $200 android phone but is it 5x better? Same with cars you can sell ferrari or more cheaper toyotas for the same value. We would have to measure how much goods we can produce.
hnanon12341
But it covers their case.
t_mann
I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.
One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.
Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
TheOtherHobbes
I think income is still too crude and misleading. You really need some kind of complex individual economic health measure made of many indicators.
But a more informative proxy would be median net worth - individual, not household, with married couple net worth divided by two for simplicity - as a fairly simple assets vs liabilities calculation.
The net worth distribution would be even more revealing because it would highlight the difference between owners and renters.
This still doesn't reveal net worth stability. In the US you can - and many people do - go from a seven figure net worth to bankruptcy because of a health crisis or (increasingly) a climate disaster.
So you'd want a supplemental distribution showing how variable net worth is, how many people are reduced to bankruptcy at each decile, and how much movement there is in each decile.
Reducing these kinds of complexities to a single number seems misleading at best.
thayne
> Even the good old GDP per capita covers your case.
Not necessarily. If most of the difference in pay goes to shareholders and/or executives, then the GDP per capita doesn't change. This could be because technology increases productivity, but in a way that increases wealth inequality, and results not only in greater wealth for the already wealthy, but less wealth for workers who are no longer needed.
psunavy03
> The problem is the media seems to only ever look at one of them at a time but we need to look at several at once to get a more complete picture.
This is what I'm getting at. I recognize there are more detailed measures, but they also never seem to inform the public discourse.
ajmurmann
Not to come off as too cynical but I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the public discourse stays generally at a very shallow level that basic research for 30 minutes quickly moves you beyond. On one hand I find that appalling and poisonous for a democracy. On the other hand, imagine everyone having to spend 30+ minutes on every important topic. It quickly gets out of hand. One could argue that the media should do that research but if they incorporate that in their communication they lose most of their audience who needs to be picked up where they are.
It's why I recently have been convinced that we need something like election my jury
root_axis
> the public discourse either lacks motivation, understanding or incentive to take a proper look.
Indeed. Almost always in these discussions people have already made up their minds about the state of the economy and will just cherry-pick whatever metric best justifies their case (typically that the economy sucks).
There's never been a time in my life where people weren't complaining about how the economy is terrible and how that's clearly obvious if you just look at the real numbers.
bentt
Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy. Everyone has a vested interest in the stock market rising, in keeping their jobs, and a shared desire to see things go up forever.
This is why there needs to be some kind of safety net so that the economy is not a proxy for life and death. In the USA, if you run out of money, you are in real trouble. We need to decouple success/failure in the market from personal safety. You should be able to try opening a hot dog stand, have it tank, and still be able to eat and go to the doctor.
pedroma
>Nobody is incentivized to share bad news about the economy.
Isn't the media incentivized to keep you watching or reading? The common criticism of media is they like to exaggerate a minor issue to get you to click on a headline.
null
mywittyname
> I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment. The thing is, at a large scale, these events don't matter. They are rare enough to be noise in the grand scheme of things.
The reason the U-3 is the canonical "unemployment rate" is because that is where the core signal is. The bulk of the change in all of the other more inclusive rates is the change in the U-3 scaled by some factor.
But really, your complaint has nothing to do with actual employment, but instead with earnings. Wages are also a metric captured and reported by the BLS and better serve your message.
jordanb
U3 is kinda silly but is mostly used because it is the original employment rate definition and therefore is comparable across time.
U6 would not include the original poster unless his new job was "minimally attached or part-time for economic reasons." U-6 does not, generally, include people who got a new job for lower pay.
MangoToupe
The harm is when people take the metric as literally "what percentage of people who want to be employed can find a job", which U-3 emphatically does not represent.
jacobr1
It doesn't directly measure it, true. But the parent poster was saying it has extremely high positive correlation to measures that do measure it, so it probably doesn't matter.
gruez
By that logic should we also further broaden "unemployment" to mean "100% - employment rate"? That's a pretty common misconception as well, maybe even more common than the one you listed.
null
wing-_-nuts
>This is captured as part of the "U-6" figure for unemployment.
I always wonder how this is captured. For U-3, you could go with the number getting unemployment benefits. For U-6, you'd have to literally call people and ask them, and I've literally never been called to ask if I'm working in my field and I'd guess most of us haven't either. I have to think if they are sampling, it's a very narrow sample likely biased by geography, industry, age, etc.
jordanb
U-6 mostly comes from the BLS Occupational Employment Survey.
I don't think the original poster would be considered as part of U-6 unless his new job is defined as "marginally attached to the workforce or part-time for economic reasons." Simply getting a job with less pay doesn't put you in U-6.
jandrewrogers
The models are pretty complicated and incorporate several data sources, sampling is just one part of it. I've seen (very dry) documents that go into the methodology in detail. The model does introduce some obvious biases through assumptions of representativeness but how those interact with the headline numbers is not straightforward.
kasey_junk
You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?
And that is before we talk about alternative signals like the ADP number this like references.
Anytime someone says “we need better ways” you should just read it as “I should do more reading”, because this is a very well studied, understood and measured set of data.
noslenwerdna
This response is a bit less than helpful. Could you provide an example of a metric from this diverse set that fits what the OP is asking for? I feel like there are at least two use cases from their post:
* a metric that measures if people's jobs are paying enough to put food on the table
* a metric that measures whether people's employment matches their education?
kasey_junk
Your first query is simply real wages. There are several real wage metrics in the bls data set. Here is a commonly referenced one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Your second query is more subjective. Most people would probably point you at the U6 underemployment number as that’s the most famous one. I like the employment projections series for this kind of question though https://www.bls.gov/emp/
marcosdumay
About the US specifically, your government reports underemployment numbers, as do almost every country report salaries distribution.
quickthrowman
This is all extremely well-known public information gathered and distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which they compile for free.
Here are all (6) unemployment measurements that the BLS makes(U1 thru U6): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
The BLS tracks damn near everything you could ever dream up economically: https://www.bls.gov/
Here you can browse every metric that the Federal Reserve Bank tracks: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
1123581321
Which metric(s) capture what he is talking about?
ipogrjegiorejkf
Take a look at the St. Louis FRED website and search for wages and wage growth.
Analemma_
Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
tqi
It's also a sign of intense hubris - the idea that thousands of labor economists have never considered something they thought of after 30 seconds of reading means that either a) the economists are all idiots or b) the reader is orders of magnitude smarter than them.
yourapostasy
This happens everywhere with lots of people in many different contexts. I call it the “‘why don’t we just’ disease”, or WDWJ Disease. When you’re in any leadership position, you have to stay especially careful to catch yourself from falling prey to this pernicious effect and behavior, and its equally debilitating sibling yak shaving when you over index on preventing WDWJ.
quickthrowman
> It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.
Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6.
The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).
jklinger410
> You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?
If I could never see another passive aggressive response like this again I would die happy.
deciduously
You of course know that "you of course know _____, right" is the preferred HN rebuttal format, right?
lovich
Active aggression is looked down upon in this forum
intended
This is a citizenry education problem, a media problem but not a metrics problem.
These metrics are built and used by people who do apply multiple measures - every day. If you are in a trading or macro oriented role, you will not be using just one figure. You will make the effort because your incentives and training encourage you to do so.
The non-specialist, which is most people, is never going to have a set of metrics which make it easy, because no metric can overcome all the practical and technical issues strewn across the path to producing it.
bilsbie
It sounds silly but we should take it one step further and look at life satisfaction. Who cares about jobs if people are unhappy?
Stay at home parents could be way more valuable than more Wall Street jobs.
jandrewrogers
It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not.
You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.
ikmckenz
I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
missedthecue
What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate.
I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.
thehoff
The linked article is talking about ADP.
"To be sure, the ADP report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report, which investors tend to weigh more heavily."
The BLS does do several measures.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
Their (BLS) news release also provides more detail.
ceejayoz
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...
> The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data.
> At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated.
> Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
duncangh
I have been thinking about this a lot recently as well and think there is a really simple answer and fix and am frustrated I haven’t seen it meaningfully attempted or discussed anywhere (passively consuming message boards etc)
Cash flow per person (per household) just like the IRS does (except also including money from loans).
vitorgrs
Unemployment might say the same, but there's also data about wages, so, not sure what do you mean.
JumpCrisscross
The actual report: https://adp-ri-nrip-static.adp.com/artifacts/us_ner/20250702...
Goods-producing companies were net hirers (+32,000). Services lost 66,000 jobs, with losses concentrated in professional/business services (-56,000) and education/health services (-52,000).
Regionally, losses were concentrated in the West North Central Midwest (-28,000), South Atlantic (-21,000) and Mountain states (-20,000). (Map with old data [2].)
Firms with 1 to 50 employees and 250 to 499 employees laid people off while smaller mid-size and large companies were net hirers.
“Year-over-year pay growth for job-stayers was little changed for June at 4.4 percent compared to 4.5 percent in May. Pay growth for job-changers was 6.8 percent in June, down slightly from 7.0 percent last month.” (Pay growth was highest in finance, +5.2%, and lowest in information services, +4.1%.)
issafram
I used to have multiple recruiters reach out to me daily on LinkedIn regarding software engineering positions.
And this was for multiple years.
That hasn't been the case for the last 3 or 4 months.
None of this surprises me and it shouldn't for others.
dmix
Have you used your linkedin profile? If you're looking for a job or are active you're going to get more attention. Your name will also start being added to lead databases when you apply for jobs and those will kick around for a couple years until it's marked as uninteresting.
zdragnar
Odd, it's gotten better for me over the last 3-4 months. The year or two prior to roughly March 2025 were very quiet, though, maybe 1 a month at most.
hliyan
Important: "[payroll processing firm] ADP's report has a spotty track record on predicting the subsequent government jobs report"
jandrewrogers
ADP and BLS numbers are measuring different things. For people that care about these things, the nuances are well-understood.
As a rough heuristic, ADP overfits to private sector jobs and BLS overfits to government jobs. There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
daveguy
> There is a popular derivative heuristic that the economy is "good" when ADP > BLS.
Surely that doesn't apply when both metrics are bad? I don't know. I'm not familiar with job reporting statistics. So info / perspective would be appreciated.
Also, when you say "over fits" I'm used to that in a machine learning context where it means data outside the fit is worse. Did you mean that ADP is more accurate with private sector and BLS is more accurate with public sector. Or is it more a matter of ADP comes in higher with private sector and BLS comes in higher with public sector. Usually, "overfit" is a bad thing in a machine learning context, but I wouldn't expect ADP to do worse in private and BLS to do worse in public. But the opposite. I would appreciate it if you could clarify the terminology from your perspective.
jandrewrogers
Yes, ADP is more accurate with private sector jobs and BLS is more accurate with government jobs, because their data sources are heavily biased toward having accurate data in those subsets respectively. They both generally assume that the data they don’t have looks like the data they do have despite the selection bias and disjointedness of their data. BLS extrapolates private sector employment from government employment and census data in ways that no one thinks is representative but that is what they work with. ADP has no government employment data in their model but has a relatively exhaustive sample of private sector employment.
People that know account for these biases. This is why the ADP > BLS heuristic exists. If private sector jobs growth is less than government job growth, reflecting the biases in their respective models, that is interpreted as either the government sandbagging the numbers with make-work jobs or private sector employment being so poor that the monotonic government employment eclipses private sector job growth. Either way, it is a bad sign.
adrr
Government job reports this year have been revised down up to 35%.
> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for March was revised down by 65,000, from +185,000 to +120,000, and the change for April was revised down by 30,000, from +177,000 to +147,000. With these revisions, employment in March and April combined is 95,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
dmix
Revised down from previously reported projections. But the numbers are pretty neutral.
> Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.9 percent), adult women (3.9 percent), teenagers (13.4 percent), Whites (3.8 percent), Blacks (6.0 percent), Asians (3.6 percent), and Hispanics (5.1 percent) showed little or no change over the month.
llm_nerd
Recent government payroll data has been hugely suspect. On the big release day the numbers are rosy and get reported to much hoopla and "told you" celebration, but then are subsequently revised downwards to little fanfare or notice. And for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact.
JumpCrisscross
> for those who wonder "why revise downward if it's a lie?", because the numbers eventually are going to collide with reality so they need to be right sized after the fact
No, this is not the reason. The numbers that get fanfare are the preliminary BLS numbers. BLS collects data through surveys. Preliminary data are published with incomplete responses. As more employers respond, the numbers get updated.
Guess which employers tend to report late? Those that are doing lots of hiring and firing. So the stable numbers come in first. Then the volatile numbers later. This is well documented, happens on the way up and down, and is constantly (and wrongly) quoted as a partisan conspiracy going both ways.
slashdev
The numbers have been so consistently wrong in the same direction. It could be that there are other things going on, but simply that volatile numbers come in later doesn’t seem to explain the bias.
intended
Why assume conspiracy, when the reason is known?
k4shm0n3y
This isn't a recent phenomena
jimbokun
> But the contraction was capped by payroll expansions in goods-producing roles across industries such as manufacturing and mining. All together, goods-producing positions grew by 32,000 in the month, while payrolls for service roles overall fell by 66,000.
Is this tariffs working as intended?
danans
If your metric is "more/better jobs", then yes tariffs are a failure.
But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
Part of the goal of the tariffs (and other non-tariff related policies) seems to be to reset leverage at all layers of the labor markets, pushing higher skilled and paid workers into lower skilled and paid manufacturing jobs by increasing the labor availability pool (primarily via workers being unable to get jobs at their previous skill/salary level).
For example, imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin at a mining company.
Similarly, cutting Medicaid benefits and adding work requirements could trigger increased availability of the lowest skilled labor, thereby reducing the wages that people doing that labor can demand.
That is all a boost for employers seeking lower cost but high skilled labor, but a knock down for all the workers.
pqtyw
> imagine a former software engineer taking a lower paid job as an IT admin
Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs? Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy like the US.
> seeking lower cost
Well they certainly aren't supporting increased tariffs if that's what they want.
danans
> Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs?
Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.
> Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy
Last I heard, software engineering done overseas is not subject to tariffs.
elcritch
If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions.
The bigger loss for all employees is the shareholders primary fallacy giving executives excuses to pay workers less. Since there’s no competition for many consumer goods then there’s no pressure to keep prices low and companies just up their profit margin.
The loss in IT / software jobs are again mostly profiteering using AI as an excuse.
danans
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage.
Unions represent only 9.9% of US labor [1], primarily in the public sector and the skilled trades. White collar workers and low skill workers tend not to have the benefit of a union.
Tariffs are maybe OK if you are, for example, an domestic auto assembly worker (assuming no job losses due to demand reduction or supply chain cost increases), but otherwise not great.
1. Union Membership (Annual) News Release - 2024 A01 Results https://share.google/dmIydp7foghcJ1Lo2
dmix
> If more goods are made locally then it seems rather that unions would have more leverage. They’re not competing with underpaid foreigners in countries with even less unions
That will take at least 5yrs to a decade to be a major economic change, not a few months after tariffs
For the rest, when analysis seems a bit too convenient it usually is.
null
null
ActorNightly
>At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
The goal originally was for Trump to become the center of attention worldwide. This is pretty much the only reason tarrifs are in place.
Terr_
Also a tool for extortion, much like how Trump was impeached for extorting Ukraine by withholding congressionally-mandated aid funds.
underlipton
Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.
High-prestige work as an escape hatch from poverty has failed, and that may be a good thing. When people accept that dirty or "unskilled" labor has to be done, and that it deserves a living wage as much as any educated position, we'll be stronger as a country. Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
danans
> Unless workers unionize and demand higher wages.
This is at odds with
> Perhaps we'd even see, with the influx of people
... because that influx of people will increase labor supply, lowering unions' bargaining ability. Unions primary leverage is their ability to withhold labor (AKA a strike).
> ... who haven't yet accepted being stuck in monotonous, menial labor and with an outsider's perspective, a renewed emphasis on bottom-up innovation and efficiency-creation.
Innovation and efficiency creation happen as the result of capital investment, via incentives to labor or by education, not as the result of hordes being forced into lower skilled labor at lower pay.
gruez
>But in a roundabout sense ... yes they are working. At least if the goal is to discipline and squeeze labor, and return leverage to employers.
I can't keep track of how many times how "X" is some sort of dastardly ploy to oppress workers, only for (different?) people to argue that "not X" also oppresses workers, with plausible sounding stories for both sides. Last time it was work from home. Is is a dastardly plot to subjugate workers by exposing them to international competition, and dehumanize them by making every interaction mediated by a glowing rectangle? Or is return to office a dastardly ploy by the capitalist class to regain leverage, by forcing workers to waste time commuting, getting distracted in open concept offices, and buying overpriced lunches?
The same is true for Tariffs. In the 2010s it was not unpopular for leftist types to say how globalization was a disaster for the American middle class, and how it only enriches capitalists. Now you're saying that tariffs were actually some sort of 5d chess move by the capitalist class to crash the economy, so they can subjugate workers? Nevermind that the capitalist class seemed pretty against the tariffs, given how much stock market dropped, and only recovered after Trump walked back on his tariffs. That's not to say something is wrong just because there's a plausible sounding argument for the opposing side, but it does mean you need to do more legwork to prove your point than to tell a nice story.
seanmcdirmid
Welcome to the world of grayscale where almost anything is never a clear win or loss. If Trump’s ideas sounded like clear losses why would he win, if they were all clear losses why would he have so many people against him? The parties aren’t at a 50-50 split by chance, American politics pushes division in the electorate where about half think the idea is bad and about the other half thinks the idea is great.
The parties definitely shift over time as well, with moderates pushing for more trade and far left and right pushing against, we just see the far right in form control of the red side while the blue side is still moderate.
doctorpangloss
[flagged]
giantg2
I'm about to lose my job too. The job market looks terrible.
zzgo
I've been unemployed for months. In the last couple of weeks, I've been rejected for jobs as a pool cleaner, shelf stocker, and a state job requiring me to check multiple email accounts and watch security cameras. I've also recently been rejected as an overnight courier and software tester.
Whatever you imagine the job market to be like, I assure you it's worse.
jjtheblunt
Don't lose hope; I left grad school right before the first dotcom failures 25ish years ago. I think you'll find that when some novel technology erupts onto the scene, the job market goes through a shift of semi incoherence, that hits folks like us.
but, it's temporary and can introduce a way more enthralling era of jobs.
hopelite
I hope you have saving to draw on. It’s been very bad for folks AB’s it’s only going to get worse from here.
I know people who don’t have to work so they have all but stopped even trying since they are just enjoying a kind of mid life retirement and working on whatever the heck they want to, including mental health and those projects they put on the back burner.
analyte123
The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
chc4
ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America. That is both a large sample size, and probably broadly representative of the economy. There will of course be some business segments that are over or underrepresented but that is different than disregarding the entire report as noise.
WillPostForFood
ADP reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.
Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.
source: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250702107/be-...
ADP has always been out of sync with BLS numbers. Here is an article in the Atlantic all the way back in 2011 talking about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-o...
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shkkmo
> That is both a large sample size,
It doesn't matter how large your sample size is if your sampling method is biased. This could be measuring market share gain/loss in different segments of a steady employment environment.
> disregarding the entire report as noise
Studies with bad / non public sampling methods should be, at a minimum, treated with great skepticism. Why would that not apply here?
robocat
A factual number that has less statistical noise or political bias is extremely valuable. Yes, one needs to factor for the biases but that doesn't mean the number should be ignored.
The trend is useful, since one can fairly safely assume that most of the biases haven't radically changed.
eastbound
ADP is predominant in large companies and has little hold in startups. It skews the stats.
hx8
ADP data does have a bias, but it is so much data it provides a valuable signal. The importance of understanding the source of your data and how it represents the largest population is something every scientist has been drilled on.
weaksauce
two small companies i used to work for used adp.
danaris
...You know that "startup" is not synonymous with "small company", right?
What's the situation in the vast swath of the economy that's made up of small non-startup companies?
chasd00
> ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America
that's less than 20%. If you had 10 people to interview and interviewed 2 of them i wouldn't say you interviewed a representative sample of the 10.
IshKebab
No, but if I had 1000 people to interview and interviewed 200 of them at random then absolutely yes.
I know right. Statistics.
jjk166
Noise is the absence of a signal. A biased signal is fine, just account for the bias.
ADP is huge and covers a broad range of sectors. It would be a very interesting result (and a very extraordinary claim) if the employment data from non-ADP companies went in the opposite direction of ADP. I certainly see no evidence that firms underrepresented in ADP's data are hiring prodigiously.
JumpCrisscross
> assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy
No such assumption is made except by an errant reading of the report. The ADP report [1] can be used to predict BLS numbers, but it’s also independently useful. The reason the headline is 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost is because 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost, ADP can directly count that.
csomar
It depends on how randomly representative it is. If it is close to random, then it's better than most poll data.
jeffbee
There have been many instances of ADP and BLS job reports being out of step, which can be expected because of their differing methodologies. On the other hand, nobody with a brain can take BLS surveys at face value under these circumstances.
quantum_state
When the government is robbing all consumers with tariffs, more bad news will come …
toomuchtodo
tomrod
What in the bad-URL-looks-like-phishing-but-appears-legit heck is this?
toomuchtodo
Content management system guid I presume, versus a title slug that can drift during editing and publishing. Archive.today link added for the cautious.
genter
Yeah, but WTF is bluematrix.com? If I see a bank name as a subdomain of a domain I don't recognize, alarm bells go off.
programmertote
Just one data point to add -- the small firm (~150 ppl) I'm currently working at recently laid off 25 people. The reasoning was there are dark clouds in the horizon in the housing market (the company is related to real estate btw).
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bix6
So rate cut incoming? :p
dyauspitr
This administration will drag this country into the gutter.
We really need better ways of measuring economic health. I could lose my six-figure job, turn around, and get hired on as a server at Applebee's for minimum wage, and the "unemployment" rate would stay the same. Not to mention that it doesn't include those not actively looking for work.
Either way, "full employment" doesn't mean much unless you take into account whether people are actually able to live a stable lifestyle or are burning the candle at both ends just to put food on the table. One of these enables folks to buy nonessentials and fund all those sectors of the economy, the other doesn't.