On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released delayed jobs data from the last two months, showing the U.S. shed 105,000 jobs in October and added 64,000 jobs in November.
But a deeper look at the employment data reveals several trends that could spell trouble for the U.S. labor market if they maintain their current trajectories.
Job creation began to falter in April
Stepping back from the report and taking a look at 2025 so far, job growth appears to have started faltering in April, around when President Donald Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs.
The year started off strong, with job creation in the first four months averaging about 122,000 per month. That's when the problems began to appear.
From May through November, job growth slowed to a pace of about 32,000 a month. Put another way, about a quarter as many positions have been created monthly since May than during the first four months of the year.
But the monthly data itself can obscure overall trends, with numbers that rise and fall from month to month and political spin on all sides.
Overall, since May there have been four months when payrolls increased and three months when they fell.
Those three months of losses are a sharp departure from the recent past. To find the last time there was any month when the country lost more jobs than it gained, you'd have to go back to 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed the U.S. economy and cost millions of workers their jobs.
Black unemployment is rising sharply
The unemployment rate among Black workers has risen higher and faster than the overall rate of joblessness in recent months.
In May, Black unemployment fell to a low for the year of 6.0%, a rate that was just 1.8 percentage points above the overall unemployment rate that month.
By November, the unemployment rate among Black workers stood at 8.3%, a full 3.7 points higher than that of the broader U.S. workforce.
The rate of job losses for Black workers is also outpacing the population overall. From May through November, the U.S. unemployment rate rose just 0.4%, but Black unemployment climbed 2.3%.
Job gains are concentrated in just two sectors
In what JPMorgan Chase called a "concerning development," detailed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that nearly all the private job growth over the past two months was in just two sectors: health care and social services.
In November, home health care aides and nursing home positions led the growth in health care jobs. Among social services positions, individual and family services, a category that includes services for the elderly and disabled people, were the fastest-growing category last month.
Indeed, Sage Economics noted that almost all of the job growth this year came from the health care and social services sectors.
Factory jobs are disappearing
If health and social welfare jobs are the big winners this year among private-sector positions, manufacturing and white-collar services are the losers.
Outside of government employment, which fell further than any other sector, the biggest sector losses this year were an 80,000-job decline in business services jobs and a loss of 63,000 jobs in manufacturing, according to economist Zach Fritz at Sage Economics.
Those manufacturing jobs were eliminated despite the Trump administration's pledge to revitalize domestic manufacturing in the president's second term.
As for the white-collar job cuts, those come amid the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across workplaces. While it's not immediately clear how many jobs lost are directly tied to AI, a recent estimate from Goldman Sachs said that if AI were adopted across the board, it "could displace 6-7% of the US workforce."
Teen unemployment has surged
The unemployment rate for teens jumped to 16.3% in November after having hit 13.2% in the most recent jobs report in September, before the government shutdown.
That’s the highest teen unemployment level since August 2020, when Covid had millions of worried parents keeping their teenagers home and out of the workforce.
