Economics and public policy professor Justin Wolfers called the Friday jobs report a big disappointment.
Writing on social media, Wolfers, who teaches at the University of Michigan, explained, "That's a big kick in the guts. Payroll is much weaker, and the U.S. lost 23,000 jobs in March, well below expectations of plus-80,000. Huge downward revisions, too: May now plus-63,000 (instead of plus-129,000), June now plus-20,000 (down from plus-53,000). Very bad news. Revise down your views substantially."
"Here's why this is so grim," he continued. "Folks expected jobs growth to slow to plus-80,000, but we got minus-23,000. Also downward revisions to the last two months subtracted a total of -103k. So over the past three months, the US economy created about 200,000 fewer jobs than we had thought."
CNBC called those numbers the "second worst number of the year."
Wolfers mentioned the revisions as well. The first numbers are usually quick estimations. So, revisions happen when large employers submit their payroll data. So, as more businesses respond over the following two months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics updates the estimate to reflect the fuller data.
Previous calculations showed that celebrations of a growing jobs market were premature, and the positive numbers were nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
Former Acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris on Friday likewise called the jobs report "grim," and noted that it's showing what Americans have been feeling for a while now.
"Job growth this year has been extremely weak. Wage growth has slowed down. The wage growth we had has been largely wiped out by the inflation caused by President [Donald] Trump's war with Iran," Harris told MS NOW. "The job growth that we have is overwhelmingly concentrated in a couple of sectors of the economy. Healthcare continues to grow even when jobs decline. In most of the rest of the economy, we're either flat when it comes to jobs, or we are declining."
Perhaps the most troubling stat from the jobs report, Harris said, is that America has lost 1.3 million workers from the job market entirely. More than one-fourth of that number came since last month.
"So, a lot of people are good quality workers who are committed to our country who are being deported because they are undocumented, but a lot of those are people just leaving the job market because there is very little hope of good quality jobs for them," he said.
There was a large spike in jobs in April, he said, and it was reason for optimism, but now he fears it could be a trap.
"The quarter trend shows us that things are going poorly and it really all began in February when the president launched this war against Iran. That's when inflation kicked up and wiped out workers' wages," Harris said. "That's when job growth slowed down the economy. And then the president piled on by adding tariffs back into the conversation, both with Canada and with the world at large. And that also is contributing to slowing the labor market."
