U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains | Hacker News Reader

U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

wsj.com

The article talks about how the Fed chair thinks we might be overestimating jobs and with the number of people I know who are currently struggling to find jobs I would believe that (not engineers, just people that had random jobs). Lots of people I know are out of work right now.

Why not engineers? I've definitely never had a harder time getting interviews, though obviously anecdotal. Or do you just mean that the scope is larger than software eng?

Many of my engineering friends happen to work in defense (I'm friends with a lot of aerospace engineers from college) and are now highly specialized engineers on stable and long term projects and happen to be at the forefront of innovation in that space and all have high level security clearances (for some of them I don't really know what they do since it's classified). Though it also could be they just have gotten lucky. My friends I made from hobbies work random and less highly technical jobs and I know a decent amount of people "in between jobs" right now. It's all anecdotal but there's a clear enough pattern that if the chair of the Fed also thinks we're underestimating I think it's very likely we are.

Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't clear on how to interpret!

i think they meant that the people they know having trouble finding jobs are not engineers

A few articles I've read note that there are indications that there has been a very strong "low fire, low hire" pattern. So while we don't see mass layoffs, those who are out, are really out.

The gig economy is hiding the real employment problem in most of the West.

How money Works "The Gig Economy is Full" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqmJN5z6Rjc (10 Dec 25)

That’s just one facet. It’s not just the gig economy is “full”, all economies are “full”.

There are not enough jobs for the employable people.

I saw a statistic that roughly 10% of the US workforce is in some form of "customer-facing service" role and I just have to wonder how many of those jobs are nearly gone, or already gone. Even if it's a 5% reduction, or 3% over the next decade, that seems catastrophic without a completely new category of jobs to replace them.

I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout. I stayed in a hotel recently and I didn't even talk to someone at the front desk. I just checked in at a kiosk and got my room card. There was no one else around.

I guess the people that used to do those jobs are all just driving Ubers and Doordash now?

> I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout

That’s at least one trend I’ve seen reversed. All the self checkouts around where I am have been removed because the stores realized that the self checkouts and honesty system only works when the times are good.

The reversal of self checkouts has been one I've seen spottily, but I do totally agree. I've seen some Walmarts close their self checkout while others keep them open. I guess each store may do their out loss calculations and take action based on that.

I personally like self-checkout a lot. At the grocery store I used to go to, I swear I could get my stuff scanned and bagged in half the time as the cashier, and that's not counting the time waiting in limited lines (since there are usually way more self checkouts so the time-to-first-scan is also lower). Very slow and they seemed to hate small talk (also a let down, because the only redeeming part of a manned line to me is casual conversation with the cashier and those in line).

Video surveillance and facial recognition is in use here to prevent that kind of thing.

You should see what target does to all their stores…

Only works when the times are good though. If you’re getting 50-100 people a day trying to steal, the cops aren’t coming

Someone still has to show up to deal with the perp. And the cops have been ‘quiet quitting’ for awhile.

In stores I’ve been in the highest density of cameras is directly above the checkouts.

It varies a lot in my local experience from no self-checkout, to a mix, to mostly self-checkout with one or two backed-up lanes of cashiers. Whether it's good or bad for me personally depends on the type of merchandise and how much I have.

In general, I essentially always interact with a front desk at a hotel and it varies at a grocery store depending on lines and the merchandise I have.

Those who are still employed by my local grocery store don't seem too motivated to do their jobs. It's an unfortunate but foreseeable scenario that expedites the problem where people prefer self-checkout.

I wish we'd pump the brakes on efficiency and profit.

They're pretty good near me

And of course, there's this idea everything needs to be done like the house is on fire, but I'm usually fairly happy if I see someone getting a break to look at their phone and doesn't notice immediately that I'm standing waiting or whatever. Or ambles over at a leisurely pace, that's fine, take your time, it's hard running around all day

> take your time, it's hard running around all day

This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.

>then relax as I bag them

Around where I live (Boston area), there are almost universally baggers. This was something that went away for a bit but, while I will if needed, I almost never bag my own groceries.

> I wish we'd pump the brakes on efficiency and profit.

This is not legal, executives of publicly traded companies are required to put maximizing shareholder value above all other considerations.

It's not that simple. I'll point you at this Harvard Law Review article[1] to start but shareholder value is not the only consideration for executives and doesn't even need to override.

1. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/will-the-real-sha...

That’s not true. Theoretical maximum shareholder value would be achieved by firing all employees and selling the company for scraps, yet we don’t see that happening. Fiduciary duty doesn’t mean you are required to squeeze profits above all else.

It would be easy to argue that would usually not maximize value in the long run, which is why they don't do that.

However, some PE firms have been successfully doing similar practices.

If it were that simple, businesses could never offer say a 10% discount or buy-one-get-one.

I suspect the implication was that consumers and voters would do the brake pumping. I don't think anyone expects CEOs or boards to be socially conscious anymore. The idea that companies would care about externalities is quaint.

This is flat-out false.

For reference:

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits.

(Emphasis added.)

Nope nope nope. They are required to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "stock price must go up".

This is misinformation. They are accountable to whatever the board and shareholders require of them, so long as that is legal.

Huh I wonder if this has anything to do why all our products are enshittifying.

Self checkouts are something I avoid unless I'm genuinely pressed for time and there's a self station open. It's a small thing, but I'd rather keep the human checkers employed.

So you've never had a cart FULL of groceries? Or are you one of those people that do 30 items at self checkout?

Buying an entire cart full of groceries that will last for weeks is a somewhat American cultural thing. I'm not saying that I've never seen it, but the norm where I live in Europe is to have one of those hand-held baskets and getting enough for 2-3 days tops.

Or they just don't live in cities which not everyone in Europe does either so they can't just walk a few blocks to grab supplies for a day or two.

Definitely an American thing.

Uber and DoorDash are full…

No, those people aren’t driving for Uber now. Let that sink in for a moment.

Less hospitality jobs, less customer-service jobs, less retail jobs, no mall jobs, no manufacturing jobs, gig economy is full, corporate jobs being replaced by AI, trains going autonomous, trucks going autonomous, this is end game capitalism. Those who own, own it all. Those who don’t, own nothing, will never own anything, will only rent/lease/borrow their lives.

This string of words made me shudder, gave me a chill.

Too true.

I go to a cashier lane whenever possible because shakes fist at cloud no one's paying me to ring up and bag my groceries.

Also, unless job automation is tied to some kind of UBI or Freedom Dividend or whatever, we're facing a dystopian future with a starving underclass. Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?

No one's paying you to fill up gas either. Do you always go inside and ask someone to do it for you?

Yeah, that's what the attendant is paid to do (I live in New Jersey). They've tried many times to make self-serve gas legal here, and I won't have it!

If I grew up getting my gas pumped for me, I would resist that going away too. Admittedly, this is my status quo bias.

> Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?

The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.

That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically.

Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our current economy.

It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)

> to supplement what the household could not grow

Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.

> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing

Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.

So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.

What happens when the jobs the migrant workers left the farm for are automated away? Do we expect other jobs to appear that won't also be automated?

Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?

> Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?

It seems to do a bit of both. People do slightly more work with lots more automation to help them, and automation generates work as well (e.g. once upon a time you'd occasionally send a memo out; now anyone can email anyone else and it all needs archiving).

Ah yes, historically. I've heard of "history".

> Ah yes, historically. I've heard of "history".

Heard of but never actually looked into? Sorry, you set yourself up for that one.

There would be if we were investing in our infrastructure the way we should be, rather than allowing an aging population to hoard their wealth and shirk their responsibilities.

> rather than allowing an aging population to hoard their wealth and shirk their responsibilities.

Middle-class Baby Boomers hoarding their wealth is exactly what we've been teaching them to do for decades. Save save save. I've been hearing it since the 1980s. Social Security is not going to be there for you.

And yet still a large part of them have no meaningful retirement, and no plan.

Facts.

My father passed last year, penniless after a 50 year career engineer. My mother passed penniless after a 40 year career. It’s so sad. They thought they did everything right. They thought they had enough saved. They didn’t. It took everything from them.

There is a lack of competition.

Watch and you'll see all sorts of things happening that shouldn't be possible in an economy with healthy amounts of competition.

An example that has been on my mind recently is dynamic pricing [0], where everyone is charged a different amount based upon what an algorithm thinks the company can get away with. When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more, because they'll just go buy from a competitor.

What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?

I grew up listening to right-wing news radio, and one of the first things I learned in the realm of politics is that "our economy is great; offer quality goods and services at a competitive price and you will make a modest profit and grow and succeed". My political journey in the following decades is a tale of me seeing more and more that idea is false. The companies that truly shape our world first curry favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then focus on crushing competition and establishing a monopoly rather than making a profit; that's why these huge world-changing companies go a decade or more without ever making a profit--the news radio people never gave me an explanation for that.

[0]: https://youtu.be/16i7bPQtoCY?t=720

To be fair, it was true when they said it, it just didn’t remain true and they kept on keeping on.

The idea of not turning a profit was to keep reinvesting it into the company. Growing the business. This “eat it all and figure it out later” mentality grew Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, just to name a few.

The goal was to become dominant so that the world depends upon your existence. Without being labeled a utility.

You and I agree though that the moat has been carved pretty wide. The market is no longer a free market. It’s a “I must play to stay” market. Meaning that all these companies are depending on each other for specific goods as they have crushed competition to the point where there are, at most, 2 choices.

>When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more, because they'll just go buy from a competitor.

Competition is meaningless when they're all owned by Blackrock and Vanguard to an extent. They can easily sacrifice a brand to test the waters, knowing consumers will move to buy from their other brands which the also own.

Macro capitalism is pretty crazy stuff. Look at the US food industry how it’s primarily 5 companies that own ALL the brands.

At the salaries they want at the salaries that employers are willing to pay for them.

In the East, too.

>The gig economy is hiding the real employment problem in most of the West.

This. Jobs that were previously contract employment jobs that came with health insurance, workers rights and social security and were mostly taken by youth as part time jobs to fund studies, are now turned into gig jobs where you get none of those things and are mostly taken by migrants who live 10 in an apartment and send the money home.

Gig work used to mean that you have several customers you bounce around for doing part time gigs, not you work full time for the same tax dodging Amsterdam based food delivery company who doesn't want to hire local workers on employment contracts to evade labor laws and liabilities.

How does this benefit society? It only benefits the capital owning class. Why isn't the government regulating this gig industry abuse? It's literally what its job is.

The capital-owning class is society. Don't you have a 401(k)?

As usual, size matters. Equating typical 401(k)s with the economic activity of the class GP is referring to is... absurd.

But pretending small-time participation in public markets is the same as billionaire participation in private markets is a great way to convince the lower classes our financial system isn't structured to move wealth away from them.

Would you rather not even have the 401(k)? That’s the situation most of the world is in.

Of course not. But it's always worth considering: are those the only options?

looks over at the maniac setting everything on fire from the whitehouse

Sure, but…. really?

The most meaningful American employment stat should be employed Americans with health insurance.

What's the point of being considered 'employed' if you can be wiped out with one trip to the ER?

So I sort of agree that there's a narrower version of employment that we should care about more than the top-line number. I'd define as maybe "households with at least one dependent under 20 and ~hours worked by household members." I would then break that down into several groups: fine (have healthcare, make enough to cover typical costs for their area, household works < 55 hours/week/adult, and can save 15% for retirement on a household basis), the struggling (make less than this, but work, or work > 55 hours/week/adult, but can cover housing and most basic expenses), and the hopeless (income too low to cover basic costs or not employed). IE If someone is working 60/hrs a week @ $10/hr, and has a kid, maybe not "unemployed" but IMO categorically, almost the same. Same thing if they just do gig work to net $20k/yr. Or are actually unemployed.

All that said, the main issue with the health insurance metric is that it would end up being a forcing function for the continued coupling of work and healthcare, which is bad and toxic.

Mhm. My fiancee had a 2 day stay at hospital (ER, admitted, discharged) that would have run her $58,000 if not for insurance.

Aaaaactually, it's the other way around: the insurance is the only reason it cost $58K.

Hah, also yes.

And then it's "negotiated" down to $15K.

And then, if you pay cash, are you going to pay a portion of what they would have "charged" the insurer? Or what they "negotiated" with the insurer?

Toss a coin!

There is an MLR (Medical Loss Ratio) rule; essentially, an insurer can keep 20% of premiums they collect. So in order to increase profits, they have to inflate premiums; in the end, 20% of $1,000 is much better than 20% of $100. And that's the reason hospitals charge $50 for an ibuprofen pill. There are other tricks like vertical integration (an insurance company owns a medical provider), quality improvements, etc... But in the end, it's an optimization game — max(users * premium_cost) — and that's why for-profit medicine/insurance sucks. (Now, spend 1% of all collected premiums for lobbing, to make sure the system keeps working lol).

This is such a myopic perspective. You're not completely wrong about the risk, but there's no good reason health insurance should be so tied to employment.

But it generally is though. You have to be doing very well as a solo contractor to afford the 1k/mo for almost comparable marketplace insurance.

There is a divide here between "is" and "ought".

What "is", right now, leads us to the suggestion of int32_64, which would actually be a good metric to keep track of.

You are right about what "ought" to be, but until and unless we can get there, maybe we can at least base our information on what "is" in the moment, not on what we would like to be the case?

I think the parent agrees with you and that tracking uninsured rather than unemployed is a better view of the economy from the ground floor.

My metric for "fully employed" would be has a job, has health insurance and has enough money in savings to fully cover their out of pocket max. Could not be a barer minimum of survival.

So that we aren’t “europoors”. Unironically.

Most job listings are fake - keep the investors, competitors and other employees think you are hiring. And who knows, maybe the right resume will actually be worth a look.

I've heard this from other people. Is there any evidence of it though?

I've had 500 applications over the last four years come back without ever having gotten an interview. With my background and experience I've always gotten at the bare minimum an HR call before. Now none.

None of the jobs ads are real.

I hear you. I've been through it too. I'm not necessarily doubting there are fake job postings. Just asking if there's any credible evidence besides our anecdotal accounts.

Is it possible it's largely caused by shitty ATS software that everyone uses and we are mistakenly attributing it to fake job postings?

I think it's more that for white collar jobs in the west, applications get spammed into oblivion that your resume will never reach an actual human without the ATS triggering a 100% match on all the buzzwords.

If you look at HN who is hiring threads sometimes the same companies post every time for very extended periods of time. And I've applied at some of them to never hear back. IMO they're just fishing for people who have specific profiles that they don't disclose in the job description, not actually hiring.

Studies have shown at least 30% are ghost jobs, which means in practice probably higher.

Add the fact that they stick around longer and I can comfortably say 50%+ of the jobs people are applying to are fake.

I get the feeling most of the newer jobs that are going to be created are going to be in the blue collar fields and the US isn't geared for providing those. I'm also not sure that people who have been conditioned to work white collar jobs will be happy to work in blue collar jobs.

> I get the feeling most of the newer jobs that are going to be created are going to be in the blue collar fields and the US isn't geared for providing those.

What blue collar field/industry is expected to grow?

> I'm also not sure that people who have been conditioned to work white collar jobs will be happy to work in blue collar jobs.

A quick google search shows about 60% of workers are white collar and about 30% are blue collar. I suspect blue collar workers are not going to be happy with the influx of white collar workers competing for their jobs.

I think it has a potential to raise a lot of the salaries of blue-collar positions in middle America, and then create demand for the trades over the next decade or so.

I find it unlikely that white collar positions will be switching drastically to blue collar unless they’re already on the fence about it or they’re not middle to high up in the white collar ladder (six figures+)

Anecdotally, from personal experience... job hunting is worse now than the recessions of 2000 or 2008. I think I belive Jerome Powell based on that. https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/fed-chair-jerome-powell-say...?

You probably need to be more granular. I got lucky, but in 2000 anything tech-related was nuclear winter. A lot of people just left the industry. 2008 was more broad-based and, while it wasn't a great market for tech (I held off making a change for a couple of years for that reason), I'm not sure it was terrible for a lot of tech.

China also have the same problem

H1B abuse is rampant, so the headline is what we expect. Jobs are for the foreign born, just look at HN for evidence of that. They even hire lawyers to help the outsourced labor “navigate our system.”

My understanding is that after being nearly flat since 2016 with nearly all the jobs going to foreign born people, there have been job gains of nearly half a million citizens in 2025 "for whatever reason".

How reliable are the unemployment numbers? Trump sacked people for not liking the numbers.

https://archive.today/r3mCK

After Trump didn’t like the numbers, weren’t unemployment figures kept secret from then on by the administration?

The US job market is way more dynamic than people realize. Roughly 1/5 of jobs are changed every year in roles permanently lost to roles newly created.

Gross job creation & destruction annually is roughly 10–12 percent of all jobs (new positions added and permanently lost across all employers).

This is down from the past, when it was 15-18 percent.

Source: US Census Bureau Data https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_job_destruction_rate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com