Free Republic

Over the past 45 years, wage growth for most Americans has been halting at best, often failing to keep up with the country’s overall economic gains. The issue underpinning America’s cost-of-living crisis isn’t just rising prices. The real culprit behind America’s affordability crisis is that employers have had too much power and too little motivation to share gains. The consequences of this imbalance are clear. The economy’s productivity grew by around 73% between 1979 and 2019, but wages in the middle rose only about 23%. Here is what this means in concrete terms. A retail worker in 1979 earned about...

Dive Brief:* Artificial intelligence was the leading cause of U.S. layoffs announced in March, accounting for roughly a quarter of the total, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report Thursday. * Overall, U.S. employers announced 60,620 job cuts last month, a 25% increase compared with February, the report found. The month’s total included 15,341 layoffs attributed to AI. * “Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at the Chicago-based firm, said in the report. “The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI...

The March report on employment from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows non-farm payrolls increasing by 178,000 jobs. This exceeded expert predictions of a 60,000 increase. Since Trump's inauguration in January of 2025 the US private sector has added 609,000 jobs. Average hourly wages are 3.5% higher than a year ago. During the Biden Administration annual blue-collar wages declined by $1,703. In the past year these wages have risen by $1,186. The annual inflation rate that peaked at over 6% during the middle years of Biden's term have fallen to 2.5% in the first year of Trump's current term....

The so-called experts didn’t just miss the mark on March jobs numbers; they got steamrolled by reality. Economists predicted a weak 59,000 jobs. The actual number came in at a stunning 178,000. Talk about getting it completely wrong. And it’s the latest reminder that the same crowd that spent months warning about economic doom under President Donald Trump still doesn’t understand what’s actually happening on the ground. Even CNN couldn’t deny that this was huge. Unemployment dipped again, falling from 4.4% to 4.3%. Even more telling, the rate dropped across multiple groups, including women, black Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and veterans....

Artificial intelligence is changing the workplace faster than almost anyone expected just a few years ago, but despite all those scary headlines about AI replacing most jobs, the reality is more nuanced. Sure, AI may be replacing certain tasks, but it isn’t replacing careers. This is an important distinction, especially for students and early-career professionals trying to choose fields that will remain valuable long into the future. Here are some careers (and skills) that are resilient in 2026. AI Isn’t Eliminating Jobs OvernightOne of the most important developments since last year is what hasn’t happened. Despite rapid advances in generative...

Private job growth totaled 62,000 in March, down just 4,000 from February’s upwardly revised level but above the Dow Jones consensus for 39,000, according to ADP. Like February’s report, two sectors essentially provided all the gains. Education and health services contributed 58,000 — identical to the February total — while construction added 30,000.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom teared up Wednesday when announcing an expansion of the state’s Service Corps geared at recruiting young men. “Forgive me, this is embarrassing,” he said, as his eyes welled. “All the noise, we just need to turn off. Listen to this, this is it,” he continued while wiping tears off his face. “We’re all just sitting there, screaming and yelling at each other, everybody’s getting at each other’s throats, trying to tear everybody down, and how are we going to get out of this? This is it,” he went on. The governor’s teary showcase was in response...

@Acyn Boebert: I am so tired of spending money elsewhere. I am tired of the industrial war complex getting all of our hard earned tax dollars. I have folks in Colorado who can't afford to live. We need America first policies right now.

This chart shows manufacturing production growth (6-month average vs. a year ago). After spending most of 2022–2024 in contraction, output has surged since mid-2025 and is now approaching +2% — the strongest growth since the post-COVID rebound. So why isn't anyone talking about it? Partly because it's invisible in the jobs data. Manufacturing payrolls have been declining. If you only look at employment, you'd think the sector is still struggling. But flat jobs + rising output = productivity growth. The sector is producing significantly more with fewer workers. This is one more piece of evidence that the productivity acceleration story...

Meta Platforms may shrink its workforce by up to 20% in a sign that artificial-intelligence productivity gains are finally materializing. According to a Reuters report from Friday, Meta has not finalized specific dates or details for cuts but is considering widespread reductions to its workforce. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of its last annual filing. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters, “This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” The company didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment. But Wall Street seems encouraged that the company is thinking about paring back its staff. Shares are up 2.9% in Monday’s...

Artificial intelligence adoption could lead to significant job struggles for entry-level workers as companies boost productivity, according to ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. McDermott told “Squawk on the Street” on Friday that unemployment for new college graduates “could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years.” Across industries, businesses are slashing costs and cutting jobs with the help of new AI tools. Last month, Block announced plans to cut nearly half its workforce as AI automates more work. Meanwhile, software firm Atlassian, which has seen its stock dive 54% this year on AI disruption fears, said this week...

Last Friday’s jobs report from the BLS shocked the market by claiming 92,000-jobs were lost in February, after the economists’ consensus called for +55,000-new jobs. Two-days previously, ADP had reported 63,000 private-sector payroll jobs being created in February – the strongest monthly private payroll gain reported by ADP since last July. ADP chief economist Nela Richardson explained this surge in jobs: “We’ve seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for job-stayers,” adding this caveat: “But with hiring concentrated in only a few-sectors, our data shows no wide-spread pay benefit from changing jobs. In fact, the pay...

"Sammy" (@sumiturkude007) on X wrote "This short film made with Seedance 2.0 is absolutely insane. The realism looks like a real movie — no one can tell it's AI." But that's not the real point. Yeah, it's a good demonstration of AI abilities in March 2026, but it's the theme and plot that get me. They are simultaneously brilliant, sad, and prophetic.

The Trump administration will continue working to shrink the size of the federal workforce after already shedding more than 300,000 employees, a White House official said on Thursday, who suggested a leaner civil service will be more effective as a result of its reduced stability. Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said at a government efficiency conference in Washington, adding it would contribute to the goal of tackling waste, fraud and abuse. He pledged that individual agencies would ensure...

Morgan Stanley is laying off about 2,500 employees, despite reporting record revenue last year. The banking giant is planning to cut about 3 per cent of its global workforce across its investment banking and trading, wealth management and investment management divisions. The lay-offs were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Many of the job cuts were said to have taken place on Wednesday, and were tied to both shifting business and location priorities and individual performance. The lay-offs come after Morgan Stanley reported record annual revenue last year of $70.65 billion, up 14 per cent on the previous year,...

Amid everything else going on right now, there is also a big economic data release happening later this week — the jobs report. This week, there have been some privately-analyzed reports released. While not as thorough as the federal data, they can give some clues as to how the labor market is doing. The payroll processor ADP, for example, reported that private sector hiring jumped in February, adding 63,000 jobs. Pay was also up 4.5%, year over year.Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the consulting firm RSM, said that jobs data is really important.“The unemployment rate, average hours worked, average hourly...

Private sector employment increased by 63,000 jobs in February and pay was up 4.5 percent year-over-year according to the February ADP National Employment Report® produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab ("Stanford Lab"). The ADP National Employment Report is an independent measure of the labor market based on the anonymized weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees in the United States. ADP's Pay Insights captures over 15 million individual pay change observations each month. Together, the jobs report and pay insights use ADP's fine-grained data to provide a representative and high-frequency picture...

The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, Labor Department data released Friday showed, sharply missing economists' expectations and stalling the nascent hiring growth that started the year. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.4%, while the share of people who have been without work for 27 weeks or more as a percentage of all unemployed hit 25.3%. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had anticipated 55,000 new positions after January's surprise print of 130,000 payrolls. Those gains were also revised lower by 4,000 positions, while December's previously reported addition of 48,000 jobs was updated to a loss of 17,000 — a...

The “Life in Venice” housing development, a multibillion-dollar replica of the Italian city on the Chinese coast, stands silent. But in recent years the remote, partially abandoned complex has drawn unlikely new residents like Sasa Chen, a burned-out young Chinese woman who until recently worked a high-earning finance job in Shanghai, China’s bustling commerce hub. The appeal? Chen pays just 1200 RMB, or $168, a month for her apartment in faux Venice in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. It’s so cheap that it's allowed Chen to retire at the tender age of 28. Experts say Chen is part of...

Industry boosters argue the U.S. is in a race with China for technological supremacy, and thus the sprint has existential stakes. But many Americans view AI through the lens of issues much closer to home: skyrocketing electricity bills, looming job displacement, teenage chatbot addiction. Last October, after 134,000 people signed a statement calling for a halt to the development of superintelligence, “I was thinking, why are we getting military people, faith leaders, and everyone signing?” says Max Tegmark, a physicist whose nonprofit organization, The Future of Life Institute, issued the statement. “And then it hit me: they’re all rooting for...