The January Jobs Report Was Worse Than You Think

Additional Resources

• January 2026 BLS Employment Situation Summary
• Dice 2026 Tech Sentiment Report
• Heineken Job Cuts

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market. Today’s February 11th. I’m Pete Newsome, and the big headline today is the previously delayed January jobs report that dropped this morning. Also, DICE just published their 2026 Tech Sentiment Report. I’ll dig into that in a minute. And a beer giant announced massive job cuts. But we have to start with the BLS data. The headline sounds good. 130,000 jobs were added in January. That should be a reason to celebrate because it’s so much bigger than we’ve seen over the past year. It’s a big step in the right direction. Also, unemployment went down slightly to 4.3%. So again, on the surface, this sounds good. But we’ve all gotten used to the small print, so to speak, at the bottom of these reports over the past, what, two years now? This has really uh been happening almost every month.

0:50

And this one was just an absolute bomb. The BLS revised the total 2025 job growth from 584,000 jobs that were added to just 181,000. That takes a monthly average from 49,000, which is what we were told along the way, down to 15,000, which is just awful. I mean, it’s beyond bad. That is about 400,000 jobs that we thought were created last year that never actually existed. So if there was already degraded trust in the BLS data, I mean, at this point, it’s essentially non existent. The revisions are out of control. Essentially, every hiring plan, every Fed decision, every forecast made last year was based on a labor market that was half of what we were told it was. So the market wasn’t slowing, it just wasn’t moving. Um, this is this is really bad. And I’d say someone needs to be held accountable for it. But who is there to do that and who’s supposed to be held accountable? We’ve seen turnover at the BLS at the top of the organization, but it hasn’t improved quickly. So when we see this big number, it appears we added a lot of jobs. I mean, relative, right? I mean, 130,000 is just slightly above where we need to be uh for the economy, but do we do we really trust it at all?

2:14

No, I I don’t I don’t think we can. So that’s this the status. There’s gonna be a lot of headlines celebrating this. You’re not gonna hear that from me because we have to read the whole report, right? Not just what they want us to see. And interestingly, I’ve already seen a tweet from BLS or the Department of Labor, I’m not sure which accounts in it, celebrating this. This is not a reason to celebrate. Finding out that what we were told for more than a year was not at all the case is never something that we should be happy about. But they’re going to try to bury this. I’m not gonna let it happen to whatever degree I can. So, not a good news story today, despite what you might see reported.

2:55

But let’s go through the January uh data in a little more detail. Healthcare added 82,000 jobs, which was more than double its 2025 monthly average. And that industry just carries the whole market. Um, no question about it. Also, construction’s helping too. They added 33,000 jobs. So they’re doing their own heavy lifting, no pun intended, actually pun intended with that. But um, but that’s pretty much it. Those are really the only bright spots. There were cuts by the federal government, lost 34,000 jobs. That’s down around 10% in a little over a year. So I think President Trump came in saying he was going to reduce the size of the federal government. That’s actually uh absolutely happening. Whether you think that’s good or not, I’ll leave that up to everyone individually. Um, also, the financial sector lost 22,000 jobs. So that is not good to see at all. We’re seeing you know pure white-collar jobs being taken. There’s a lot of people who will still say AI is not an impact. We see that AI washing is is supposed to be a thing, right? Where companies are claiming AI, but not that’s not really the reason. I I think we’re soon going to see the opposite.

4:09

I think we’re soon going to see companies laying people off because of AI and then trying to hide it and portray it as something else, because there’s going to be a huge backlash. And I’m very much on record with this. I don’t mind um saying it almost on a daily basis. And if I’m wrong, well then good. I’ll I’ll gladly apologize in five years if the job displacement hasn’t been what I truly believe it will be. But right now, when I see the financial sector losing that many jobs, well, you know what? AI is doing a lot of things that we used to need people uh to do in that space. So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens soon. But this is a trend that is absolutely worth paying attention to. Another number that jumped out at me was long-term unemployment. It was up 386,000 year over year. So we currently have about 1.8 million people who have been out of work for more than six months, and that’s what that number tells us.

5:06

So that’s a bad trend as well. So good. The January number is fine if it’s accurate, probably isn’t, but that’s what the headlines are gonna show. Um, if you’re listening to me, and I hope you continue to, you’ll get the full story on this. Now, let’s shift gears a little bit. And this is more uh talking about a tight and anxious workforce, um, rightfully so. It and it’s based on the DICE 2026 sentiment report that came out. I’m gonna try to screen share, which I don’t typically do. So bear with me a second here. Uh we’ll I want to go through and hit some of the highlights of this report that again was just published this morning. They call it um the defense, the defensive job market. That’s how they framed it. And I think that’s look, we all look for catchy terms when we’re publishing content like that, but I think that one is pretty much spot on. Um it tells what workers are feeling right now, and IT workers, technical workers are certainly feeling the heat of this. So uh just some quick highlights on this. 74% said they plan to change employers, but only 41% expect to find something better.

6:17

So that’s a that’s a really big gap. And when I think of sentiment, just like our own um survey, we we measure that each quarter. That tells a story, right? Because it’s not about the headlines, it’s about what the workers are actually feeling. And when you take a survey like this, it has large numbers behind it. That’s who we should be listening to because these are the people. This is this is what matters, right? It matters what workers are actually experiencing in real time. Also, active job searching went up to 55%. That was up from 39% in 2024. So a lot more people are looking for jobs, and 88% said employers hold the power. Well, yes, it that should be 100%. Anyone who doesn’t think this is an employer’s market right now is not paying attention. So it’s always good for me to see when worker sentiment matches what I know is happening in the job market. And this is very much an indication of that. Now, let’s look at the postings, and this is this is really telling. I mean, this this is something I don’t like to see, but once again, I’m not surprised at all. Tech job postings dropped to about 575,000, which was below the 2019 pre-COVID baseline. So you you just see this is really heading in the wrong uh direction here. We there was a peak, that’s what I’m I’m trying to highlight here. I don’t know if this shows up on the um on the screen. I think it does that job posting’s really peaked post-COVID, but we’ve seen essentially a steady decline since then and a decline quarter over quarter right now from Q3 to Q4 of 2025.

8:02

So the trend is not good there either. I want to share just a few other stats from this report before we move on. 22% said they’ve been laid off. 80% believe they applied to a ghost job. But the number on this page that really jumps out at me is that half of the tech workers are applying for jobs they’re overqualified for because they believe the market is that tight. They’re right. But when we see people applying for jobs that are beneath them, we want to see the opposite. We want to see people applying for jobs that they’re not qualified for, but overqualified, that tells a big story uh as much as anything else in this report. So the conditions just aren’t good. The hottest job markets for IT were Austin, San Francisco, Columbus, and New York. Seattle had the biggest decline. And then from a job posting standpoint, AI engineer postings absolutely exploded, up 208%, machine learning engineer is up 52%. So the AI space is where it’s at. I’m not, it’s not just me saying it. This is the data telling the same story. So that’s the tech report from Dice. If you want to check it out, go to Dice.com, you can find it, and I’ll link it as well. But also, before we go, Heineken announced that they are cutting up to 6,000 jobs over the next two years. Carlsberg just did the same thing. I think that was last week.

9:33

So we’re seeing these giant beer companies uh cutting jobs. Everyone loves beer, but maybe they’re just shifting their taste, right? Maybe Heineken, Heineken seems like an 80s brand to me. I don’t, I don’t, I’ve never liked Heineken, um, but I don’t see a lot of people drinking it anymore. So maybe that’s why I don’t think that beer popularity is necessarily on the decline. Maybe it is. But um I think Modello, right? Modello’s the one that’s kind of taken over, and I see that everywhere now, and it’s good. But um Heineken, lots of cuts coming. So those are the headlines.

10:07

Before we go, here’s a fun fact. France, do we care about France? Not really, but they have a right to disconnect law, and that means that employees don’t have to check email after hours. Okay, well, I mean, I don’t think employees in the US have to. I mean, some jobs, but that’s a law in France where nobody can be required to do that. So, you salespeople out there, well, uh good luck. I think your competition is and is probably still doing it if you’re one of those people adhering to that, to that law.

10:40

So just because you don’t have to doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. So those are all the headlines today, again. The jobs report is the big story. I’ll be curious to see how that gets portrayed in the in the news, in the with the major stations in and how the White House is going to address it. Are they going to acknowledge this big shift or is it just going to get buried like so many stories do lately? I don’t know. We’ll find out in the near future. But thanks for watching today. Please like and subscribe, share with anyone who you think might be interested, and I will talk to you tomorrow.