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🌷Happy Mother’s Day. I’m back from a week in Orlando, where fintech giant FIS announced a new partnership with Anthropic to build agentic AI products. FIS’ global head of corporate strategy Himal Makwana is my latest guest on the pod. I’ll share more from my trip in Macro Talk this week, so stay tuned.
In today’s newsletter, which I’m making free in honor of Mother’s Day, I attempt to describe the current labor market in a way that captures both what’s happening and how this environment is actually being perceived. There’s a lot of weirdness and some warranted fear.
A special hello to new friends and subscribers from Media Party NYC! Thanks for being here.
If you have feedback on this issue or have a story idea, email me.
Seeing Is Believing
WSJ lays out the outsized movements of IT job market versus the rest of the economy.
I love this chart. It shows how volatile tech job losses have been compared to the overall economy.
As I reported two weeks ago, these gyrations have earned the industry outsized media attention, which in turn has shaped public perception of the wider labor market.
And on that note…
Show Me What’s Real
The April jobs report confirms we remain in a resilient labor market. But I want to paint a picture that captures both its essence and the way it's being perceived — to square reality and the vibes. That image: a hibernating bear.
It's still, not very active, but scary to approach all the same.
USA, Alaska, Katmai National Park, Coastal Brown Bear sleeping along salmon spawning stream. (Photo: Paul Souders)
The reality
Overall, big layoff announcements and monthly data on firings have actually been running cool, the WSJ notes. But disproportionate media coverage of layoffs by the likes of Meta and other tech giants masks this reality and stokes fear.
The pace of hiring remains slower than during the post-pandemic boom, but it’s not non-existent. (You can blame interest rates and uncertainty around tariffs, AI investments, and the conflict in Iran for employers’ reluctance to expand workforces.) And so the challenge of finding a job in this environment is now also fueling pessimism and more fear.
Now if you're an employed worker viewing this scene from a distance, you're not inclined to mess with this bear. You're latching on to your current job and definitely — definitely not looking to poke the bear.
But if you're looking for a job — particularly if you're early in your career or recently unemployed — you have to approach this bear and you’d be right to be wary. Even in its low-movement state, there’s danger, including longer stretches without work and potentially unhealthy levels of anxiety.
So when does this labor market transform into something friendlier, like a "fluffle" of job openings and hiring?
When we get more clarity on one or more of the macro factors mentioned above. And when that does happen, new job growth will likely be industry-dependent. Just look at healthcare, which has added 3.6 million roles since 2022 — more than all other sectors combined.
NYT charts what the WSJ also illustrated — outsized attention on tech shedding jobs compared to jobs added elsewhere.
A few worrying signs
Bloomberg notes that the U-6 rate, “a broader measure of unemployment, which includes people working part-time for economic reasons and discouraged job-seekers, rose to 8.2%, the highest this year.”
And the outlet’s senior editor Chris Anstey noted separately that the unemployment rate held steady only because people left the labor market — “not what you want to see from an economic growth perspective.”
The big picture
Companies typically prefer to run lean, and AI could be their new magic wand in granting those wishes. But in bad news for them, good news for workers — we seem to be a long way off from that future.
This week, a study from the Budget Lab, a Yale research center, found that AI has not impacted U.S. jobs data yet in “statistically or economically significant” ways.
The play
It’s on business leaders to prove they can apply AI to meet their ambitions without destroying trust with their workers and the public with a vision of job destruction.
As for workers, control what you can control, as executive coach and author Dorie Clark shared in Macro Talk’s very first episode.
"The importance of networking and relationship building, and building a strong personal brand, has become even more urgent and even more critical," she said.
The networking piece isn't about the contacts you have — it's about the contacts you're actually maintaining. A stale network won't help you when your industry shrinks. You need to be top of mind before you need anything from anyone.
As for personal brand: people want to help people they like. But it's a lot easier to help someone when they can say, concretely, what that person actually does well, Dorie said.
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Happy Mother’s Day!
My mother and I after her performance at Jazz At Lincoln Center last year.
This is my mom.
Watching her lead our family, quietly and steadily through so much turmoil, made me endlessly curious about how people carry responsibility. How they show up for others when it's hard. How they make decisions without a playbook. How they keep going when no one is watching.
It's a big part of why I’ve remained a business journalist. Leadership lessons for me began at home.
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Macro Talk’s mission is to help business leaders and early- to mid-career professionals understand the big picture and make decisions about the future. Through this newsletter, the podcast, and live events, Macro Talk uncovers the forces shaping the economy and world of work — and how to play them.
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