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  • Hacker News
  • Interesting, this article doesn't seem to mention the layoffs from the tech industry. Which, if you look at the numbers, sort of make up the bulk of it.
    by Simulacra
  • No, this is wrong. If you read the report, the bulk of the job contraction was in industries entirely divorced from the tech sector. I don’t understand why you would make this comment without even reading the article, let alone the report itself.
    by emp17344
  • Tech sector is not the bulk of it, many sectors doing worse and that is why they got the headlines. "Financial Activities" supersector was terrible this month. Another reason is there is not an umbrella "tech" sector in the NAICS, so it's harder to report on.
    by jeffbee
  • These jobs lost/gained and unemployment statistics, especially on a monthly basis, and when the numbers are so small, are just noise. Seasonal adjustments alone (baseline assumptions on how many people should be employed) make them meaningless, as does the government definition of being unemployed or looking for work.

    As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.

    If you are software engineer who has not been able find a software job, and are now flipping burgers to at least have some income, then you have also dropped off the government stats since you now have a job.

    And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.

    When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.

    by HarHarVeryFunny
  • "And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything…"

    And I suspect, sometime in the future, we're going to discover that the numbers were even worse than we thought they were—were covered up.

    by JKCalhoun
  • And this is even after Trump fired the previous Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner for simply reporting poor jobs growth.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...

    by nprz
  • So you are saying it's even worse than the numbers reported.
    by mempko
  • >As far as the government is concerned if you have been looking for a job for so long and/or are so discouraged that you stop looking, then you are no longer "unemployed" since you are not looking for a job.

    > ...

    >When you read headlines of companies laying off thousands of employees, that's real. When the government says they've retroactively adjusted their seasonally adjusted fake news, then not so much.

    The BLS keeps track of the discouraged workers as well, and it's not significantly different than previous trends.

    https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...

    >And then you have the current president's habit of just lying about everything, and threatening anyone who doesn't support his lies, and it seems we have truly entered a post-truth world where "alternate facts" rule the day.

    You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?

    by gruez
  • I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).

    I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.

    They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.

    by everforward
  • > The BLS said employment contracted the most in “local government education,” which declined by 50,000 roles, likely reflecting teachers during summer break

    Are most teachers considered and counted as unemployed during summner break? All the teachers I know are paid 12 months a year. 10-month appointments are seen in colleges and universities but even there professors often have grants that pay for their research in the summer and even if not I don't think I'd consider them "unemployed" in the summer.

    by SoftTalker
  • Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.

    We also have 4.8 million that are part-time employed, but want full-time work. That’s up from 4.7 million last month, and up from 4.5 million in June 2025, and up further from 4.2 million in June 2024.

    There’s also 6.0 million that want a job, but aren’t employed. This is the same as June 2025, but up by 800,000 since June 2024.

    So if you take the U-3 number (what’s reported) then factor in the other two figures, you really have 10.5% that are unemployed, discouraged, or underemployed.

    —

    The other question never answered is, “How many jobs are needed to create equilibrium?”, or where the employment rate remains stable. That’s NEVER talked about by media or the BLS, but it’s actually not difficult to get an approximate answer.

    You’d want to look at population growth rates for 18-22 years ago (as those people would now be entering the workforce), multiply that by the labor force participation rate, and then divide as appropriate for the period. Typically, the US economy would need 140,000 - 145,000 new seasonally-adjusted jobs created every month to maintain a steady employment rate, given its historic and current population growth rates.

    by GoofGarage
  • Meanwhile Canada is up 75,000 jobs in July. Can't wait to see the next tantrum America throws our way.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-jobs-july-2026-9.729...

    by Waterluvian
  • Sorry, what's the connection here?
    by okdood64
  • somehow it seems like you're implying that canada is doing better than the usa. just look at the last 10 years of real gdp growth and it couldn't be any worse for canada.
    by kwar13
  • Roughly 40 percent of Canadians in the top 1 percent of earners have moved to the US.

    https://thehub.ca/2026/04/03/can-anyone-solve-canadas-brain-...

    by thisisauserid
  • One of the saddest parts of the current era is the wedge that has been driven in the US/Canada relationship. Canada is in the process of removing as many dependencies on the US as possible, because the US has destroyed trust in it, resulting in the need to turn to countries like China to be bigger trading partners. I'd say there's a possibility (as in > 30% chance) that Canada and European nations enter a post-NATO defense organization that excludes the US, something that seemed absolutely ludicrous even two years ago.

    Sadly, the people responsible for this in the US have no clue it's happening, no clue of the negative consequences they will face because of it, and show a general disregard for understanding things or relationships in general. The information environment in the US has been rewarding ignorant selfishness for too long, shifting the entire nature of about 30%-50% of the population in negative way.

    by epistasis
  • Vertical Thinkers: “Who could’ve seen this coming when all the data looks good?!”

    Lateral Thinkers: quietly sipping tea, nursing our wounds from layoffs, lamenting another unheard Cassandra moment.

    Basically sums up the mood, I find. Don’t worry, we’re always steeping a fresh pot for the new club members when stories like these hit the wire.

    by stego-tech
  • govt is resetting the baseline now, so we will see some good numbers in November.

    it's all about optics for mid term.

    by jimmydoe
  • Maybe. But I think the government could just lie about both quarters and then restate after the election.
    by jordanb
  • The 2026 midterm election date is November 3rd, the jobs numbers are released on the first Friday of the month, November 6th. Intentionally trending numbers down in August, with only two more jobs reports before the election, would be risky (and stupid, and extremely unlikely). The Trump Administration just doesn't look ahead like that either, they live in the perpetual now.
    by Yapping7880
  • if the government was able to lie on the jobs report, why wouldn't they just continuously pretend that jobs are up from now all the way through the election? (all the way through to the presidential election, for that matter)
    by wavemode
  • No. Very bad economic numbers in August before a midterm is not a cunning political optics move.
    by m-hodges
  • And, as a result, the market is ... up?
    by ethagnawl
  • Yeah, I'll never understand the disconnect between Wall Street and the mudslide of diarrhetic bad news that has been rolling in constantly.
    by JKCalhoun
  • Bad news is good news, leading to possibly fewer rate hikes
    by cxmcc
  • If the market expected a worse job loss than 23,000 that would make sense.

    I'm not actually suggesting there's a good reason for market swings, just that bad news shouldn't necessarily cause the market to go down.

    by staticman2
  • The market is going up because the market (AI) thinks it means there will be a rate cut. Which is good for stocks.

    But I have to inform you all that we are in a period of stagflation and there is no way out but pain for someone. Either the asset holders or the regular people who need to buy things.

    by Noaidi
  • This is why engineers don't make money trading markets
    by andxor
  • I wonder if this is the evidence of the labor market decoupling from "the economy" in terms of economic productivity?

    Folks keep predicting it. Maybe it's starting?

    by mapontosevenths
  • Private sector gained jobs. Public sector lost more jobs than the private sector gained. News reports a negative number.
    by energy123