Gallup’s second annual job quality study surveyed 17,874 employed adults ages 18 to 75 from January 26 to March 24. It defines a quality job as one with fair pay and benefits, a safe and respectful workplace, and a predictable schedule.
Forty-one percent of workers meet that standard, unchanged from 2025.
Older workers and those with advanced degrees are more likely to have a quality job.
Workers in low-quality jobs were nearly twice as likely to be working for a different employer a year later.
Fifty-one percent of those in quality jobs report better health, compared with 35 percent of those in other jobs.
AI use is more common in the better jobs typically held by college graduates, and those are the workers most worried about being replaced.
Read more via Axios
Job growth has picked up this year, but three Atlanta Fed economists say other measures point to a labor market in a holding pattern.
Monthly job growth averaged 87,000 from March through September, about a fourth of the 2021 to 2024 monthly average.
The unemployment rate has stayed under 4.5 percent since last November.
Workers have quit jobs at the lowest rate since 2015, apart from the pandemic months.
Paul Mohnen, one of the Atlanta Fed economists, says lower churn puts downward pressure on wage growth and productivity, and makes it harder for new entrants to find work.
Atlanta Fed contacts almost unanimously report little hiring planned for the rest of the year, citing uncertainty tied to the Iran conflict and oil prices.
Have we turned a real corner? Not really."
Read more via Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
Harvard economists and business professors say today’s labor market tells us little about the next decade, and that companies’ clumsy AI rollouts are part of what is holding back layoffs.
Unemployment is hovering around 4.1 percent, and Accenture says 52 percent of top executives expect AI to increase entry-level hiring.
Joseph Fuller and Accenture Research found 41 percent of work tasks can be automated or augmented by AI today, but only about one-third of firms’ AI experiments succeed.
Doug Elmendorf, a Harvard Kennedy School economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, says significant AI job losses are very likely in the coming couple of decades, though most people should find new work.
Companies are not training people formally, so employees are basically using it like glorified Google, and they’re not getting much productivity out of it.”
The scenario in his National Bureau of Economic Research paper with the largest effects has 3 million people out of work at any given time, compared with an estimated 1.5 to 2 million jobs lost to the China trade shock between 2000 and 2007.
Harvard Business School Professor Raffaella Sadun says automating people out of jobs trades short-term savings for long-term problems, because employees hold firm-specific knowledge that is worth more than their job descriptions suggest.
Read more via Harvard Business School
Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab launched a set of monthly dashboards in June that track AI’s effect on jobs and the economy. One was built with ADP Research using anonymized payroll data.
Employment in AI-exposed jobs like software development and customer service has dropped by more than 4 percent this year.
Employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in those two fields has fallen more than 3 percent annually since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, and the decline has sharpened to 4.4 percent recently.
Occupations that skew toward automation have slower or shrinking employment growth, especially among early-career workers.
The lab’s 12 broader economic indicators show little movement so far.
Researchers saw slower job growth for young women than for young men, but say the payroll data may not be representative enough to confirm a pattern.
We don’t want to fly blind into what could potentially be a very large economic transformation.”
Read more via Stanford HAI
The Federal Reserve has an interest rate meeting in a little over a week, and economists say it will eventually have to raise rates to fight inflation. September data showed consumer prices up 3.7 percent over the past year, producer prices up 6.3 percent and import prices up 8.1 percent.
Courtney Shupert of MacroPolicy Perspectives expects job losses in housing, where higher mortgage rates discourage buyers and raise financing costs for homebuilders.
Temp jobs fell by 11,000 in September, and Shupert expects employers that rely on temp workers to cut more.
Kate Bahn of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research says workers already struggling to find jobs will be more likely to accept worse jobs with lower income growth and worse benefits.
Bahn says it can take six months to two years for the labor market to feel a rate increase.
The thing I’ve been telling people is just that the labor market is actually, frankly, quite boring right now.”
Read more via Marketplace
The Black unemployment rate rose a full percentage point in September, the fastest one-month increase since 2012 apart from the pandemic. Economists caution that monthly changes for individual demographic groups come from small samples.
The 7 percent rate compares with 3.6 percent for white workers.
Black unemployment peaked above 8 percent in November 2025 and had fallen to 6 percent by August.
Employment among Black women 20 and older has fallen to 10.3 million from a record of about 10.7 million in 2023.
Revelio Labs data shows U.S. employers have cut more than 2,600 roles since 2023 with “diversity” or “D.E.I.” in the job title or description.
Jared Bernstein says rising Black joblessness and weak hiring in business services suggest the labor market is in worse shape than the 4.2 percent overall rate implies.
When the economy sniffles, Black unemployment catches a cold.”
Read more via The New York Times
Gen Z workers are running into slower hiring in industries that have traditionally offered entry-level jobs, Spectrum News reports from Louisville, Kentucky.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 8 percent unemployment for ages 20 to 24 in September, compared with 3 percent for ages 25 to 54.
Sarah Ehresman of KentuckianaWorks describes a “low hire, low fire environment” and says job postings are down 25 percent from 2021.
The slowdown in Kentucky is showing up in manufacturing, finance and insurance.
Ehresman says manufacturers are announcing big investments that create fewer jobs because much of the money goes into equipment.
Healthcare and hospitality are offering some openings for young workers.
When I was a kid especially, everyone was told learning how to code is going to set you apart. But now it’s like everyone can code with ChatGPT.”
Read more via Spectrum News
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the March executive order can stand while the case continues. Higher education groups sued in April to stop it.
The order bars federal contractors from “disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity” in recruitment, employment and other areas, and threatens contracts for violations.
U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled the plaintiffs failed to show they were likely to win and denied their request for a preliminary injunction.
Abelson wrote that the order only applies to conduct already prohibited by federal law, meaning intentional discrimination.
Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs, said the ruling provides clarity for contractors and “defangs” the order.
The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education called the ruling “a clear win” for its members despite the denied injunction.
Read more via Higher Ed Dive, U.S. District Court decision
A Willis Towers Watson survey of 6,000 full-time U.S. employees, conducted February to May, finds financial security dropping while other measures of well-being improve. Employers are also preparing to shift more health costs to staff in 2027.
Thirty-six percent of employees feel financially secure, down from 46 percent in 2019 and 41 percent in 2024.
The share who say they are physically thriving rose to 64 percent from 54 percent over the same period.
Nearly a third put off or skipped a medical or dental appointment in the past year because of cost, including about 41 percent of workers in their 40s.
Employees report being healthier, steadier and less isolated than they were in 2019. Money is the one place that progress did not follow, and it is the area employees now tell us they need the most help with.”
Employees under high financial distress lose 23.6 days a year to absence and presenteeism, compared with 11.7 days for those under low distress.
Mercer projects employer health benefit costs will rise 8.2 percent per employee in 2027, the largest increase since 2003, and 59 percent of employers plan cost-cutting changes such as higher deductibles.
Read more via CBS News, Insurance Business
Australia: Reserve Bank of Australia Assistant Governor Christopher Kent says the labor market is loosening faster than the central bank forecast, and the open question is whether weaker demand or rising labor costs are behind it. Unemployment came in higher than expected in September, and the bank hiked its cash rate to 4.6 percent late last month, a 15-year high. (Bloomberg)
Canada: A Bank of Canada survey found firms now expect inflation to reach 3.7 percent in the third quarter of 2027, up from 3.2 percent before trade talks with the U.S. collapsed. Only 36 percent of firms expect to add to their payrolls over the next 12 months, and economists say the results could set up the bank’s first rate hike in more than three years on Oct. 28. (The Wall Street Journal)
United Kingdom: Bank of England policymaker Megan Greene says progress on easing pay pressures has stalled and the labor market has less slack than officials thought, and she wants the bank to raise interest rates at its next meeting. Private-sector wage growth picked up to 3 percent in the three months through August, the first acceleration since late 2024, and unemployment unexpectedly fell. A majority of the committee is now expected to back a quarter-point increase, with the decision due Nov. 5. (Bloomberg)
