The November Jobs Report indicates that US hiring is continuing at a robust pace even amidst massive layoffs

The labor market showed everyone just how resilient it is even among the strained efforts of the Federal Reserve to cool the economic turmoil in the US. According to the jobs report by the Labor Department on Friday, employers have kept up the continuous demand for new talent throughout November. This thwarts the attempts of the Fed to tamp down hiring in order to push down the rising inflation.

Although the tech industry made headlines in the past few weeks for waves of large-scale layoffs, the latest jobs report indicates that employers added a whopping total of 263,000 new jobs in November. The unemployment rate remained steady at 3.7% at the end of the last month.

This shows us how resilient the labor market has been through a series of interest rate hikes by the Fed all over the past year. Industries that are the most affected by borrowing costs including construction and manufacturing have also refused to slow their diminished growth rate after the pandemic.

Although businesses are not expanding as they used to before, growth has not come to a stop altogether. Jon Guidi, chief executive of HealthCare Recruiters International, expresses his opinions on the matter, “It feels to me like we’re not in a decline, just in a consolidation, kind of a flattening.” Guidi believes that there is still no strong negative indication of anything. It is more of a hiring slowdown, rather than an all-out hiring freeze.

The healthcare industry where Guidi comes from is one of the industries with the highest job opening rates. Healthcare employers are trying to rehire the workers who dealt with the worst parts of Covid-19 in the past years. The percentage of healthcare workers quitting their jobs, as well as the job postings, have declined from the high numbers they were at the start of the year.

Customer spending habits have changed from the trends set up during the pandemic years. As a result, transportation and warehousing industries are hit hard with hiring freezes. The shopping binges of the pandemic days have shifted more towards purchases in the travel and leisure sectors. Although the overall number of jobs in the transportation sector remains above the 2019 baseline, many independent drivers have quit the industry for other jobs.

Bob Costello, the chief economist of the American Trucking Associations, voices his opinion about employment in the transportation sector, “If you’re a good driver, you don’t have a slew of accidents on your record and you can pass a drug test, there’s no reason for you to be unemployed unless you want to be. Zero.”

The purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing was measured to be a negative value in November. This is the first time the number dipped into minus since the pandemic. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that layoffs have quadrupled last month from what it was last year. The biggest contributor? The tech sector laying off 53,000 workers.

Although the layoffs in the tech sector have no danger of spreading into other industries of the economy, those will have an impact in some regions of the US depending greatly on those highly paid positions. “I think it’s a little premature to see downturns in other industries; tourism is still doing OK,” says Ted Egan, the chief economist for the City of San Francisco. He points out how 2/3 of San Francisco’s growth since 2010 has come directly or indirectly from the tech sector. He continues, “But I think eventually we will see tech drag down the local economy.”