The jobs market is getting worse and white-collar layoffs piling up

The language of Friday’s monthly jobs report makes the headline number sound like a nonevent. Total nonfarm payroll employment “edged down” by 92,000 in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, while the unemployment rate “changed little,” up from 4.3% to 4.4%.

But the standardized verbal window-dressing partially obscures harder truths. Last month, the U.S. economy shed jobs, and this time, the trend was clear in the initial data collection, not just in after-the-fact revisions.

Here’s what to know.

A close read shows the sector-by-sector shedding

The information sector lost 11,000 jobs — or double its average monthly loss over the prior year. Federal government employment fell by another 10,000, extending a decline that has now erased more than 300,000 positions since October of 2024.

The number of people facing what the BLS terms “long-term unemployment” — meaning those jobless 27 weeks or more — has climbed by 400,000, to 1.9 million from 1.5 million a year ago. This alone suggests that those who lose jobs struggle to find new ones.

The fresh BLS report likewise revealed greater weakness in recent months, as revisions to previous data were announced. December’s payroll number was revised from a gain of 48,000 to a loss of 17,000, meaning that month was actually a job-losing period that we are only learning about now.

This pattern of downward revision has become a recurring feature of recent labor market data. Ditto the gap between headline numbers and the underlying picture in white-collar employment.

White-collar labor market woes continues

Reports this week pointed to both Morgan Stanley $MS -2.16% and Oracle $ORCL -2.48% planning thousands of layoffs, with Oracle’s cuts described explicitly as a response to the cash crunch caused by its AI data center push. That means Oracle redirecting financial resources away from corporate payrolls and office workers and toward construction. This week’s ADP payrolls report also showed professional and business services eliminating 30,000 positions in February even as the topline number appeared positive, and widespread headlines treated the report as good news.

But positive cursory reads ignore more alarming trends, experts say.

White-collar payrolls have now contracted for 29 consecutive months. According to Aaron Terrazas, a former chief economist at Glassdoor, that’s without precedent. “It’s clear that white-collar hiring has slowed and white-collar payrolls have contracted. This is incredibly unusual, going back 70, 80 years,” Terrazas said in a recent interview with Quartz. “The fact is, we have not seen this long of a contraction in white-collar jobs outside of a recession ever before. That has to be kind of ringing some alarm bells.”

Headline unemployment numbers — like Friday’s 4.4% figure — obscure this more sector-specific white-collar issue. Terrazas argued that the unemployment rate has become a less reliable signal than it once was, as labor market slack increasingly appears as underemployment and workforce exits rather than formal unemployment. The more telling indicators, he said, are job postings and hiring rates, both of which have been depressed for some time. “We’re kind of getting smoke signals in all of these different corners of the economy right now,” Terrazas said.

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