When Starbucks announced last month that he had quit more than 1,000 corporate employees, he stressed a disturbing tendency for white -collar workers: in the last few years they have seen a more steep increase in unemployment than other groups. Slow wage growth.
In addition, he added fuel to a discussion that occupies economists during this time: Is the latest work losses just a temporary development? Or do they point to something more ominous and irreversible?
After sitting below 4 percent for more than two years, the general unemployment rate has exceeded this threshold since May.
Economists say that the labor market remains strong compared to historical standards and that most of the last weakening seems to be linked to the economic effect of the pandema. Companies hired an aggressive way by increasing the demand, then dismissed when they started to increase the federal reserve interest rates. Most of these companies have tried to make their operations weaker under the pressure of investors.
However, due to the rapid progress in artificial intelligence and President Trump targeting federal agencies that support white -collar jobs in a disproportionate way, some wonder if a permanent decline for information work has started.
Northern Trust’s chief economist Carl Tannenbaum said, iz We see a meaningful transition in the white -collar world in the form of work. ” “I’m telling people that there’s a wave.”
To date, few industries summarize the change of the last few years better than the production of video games. An explosion started in 2020 Americans connected to the couch while looking for new home entertainment. The industry hired it in an aggressive way before reversing the course and starting to dismiss. Thousands of video game workers lost their job last year and a year ago.
The scale of work loss is so that Game Developers Election AwardsThe industry’s annual prize show complained about “record layoffs” during the opening monologue in 2024. In the same year, a trade unionization trend that started with lower paid quality assurance testists, a unionization trend spread to better paid workers such as game makers, designers and engineers, spread to better paid workers in companies engaged in hits. Fall out And World of Warcraft.
Bethesda Game Studios, who belongs to Microsoft and made Fallout, said that workers were partly unionized because they were concerned about their dismissal tours in 2023 and 2024, and that a union would felt that they would give leverage in a softening labor market.
Taylor Welling, a producer in the studio with a master’s degree in Interactive Entertainment, said, “Bethesda has first lived a lot of dismissal for a long time,” Taylor Welling said. “He was afraid of many people.” Microsoft avoided commenting.
Unemployment Finance and related industriesAlthough still low, increased interest rates slowed down the demand for mortgage, from 2022 to 2024, and the companies tried to be more simple. One Call for earnings Last summer, Wells Fargo’s General Manager said that the company’s “productivity initiatives ında was proud of the company’s workforce for 16 flat quarters, including a decrease of approximately 50 percent of the company’s home loan section since 2023.
In the fall last autumn, Wells Fargo dismissed approximately one quarter of 45 employees to the behavioral management recruitment team, which reviewed the accusations of company abuse against customers and employees. Heather Rolfes, A lawyer left a lawyer, the company believes that the US labor force is trying to save money by narrowing money and he and his colleagues are an attractive target for trying to union soon, he said.
“I think it was great for them to get rid of two birds with a stone, Mrs Mrs. Rolfes said. Some of his former colleagues say that they are worried every Tuesday after a salary day, because the company tends to inform workers about business cuts. “We always feel that we can be dismissed,” he said Eden Davis, Another worker in the team.
A Wells Fargo spokesman said in a statement that the dismissal has nothing to do with the union and that we regularly review and adjust the personnel levels to comply with market conditions ”. He said that the two managers in the team lost their jobs.
Aif Rafiq, the author of a book on the corporate strategy in McDonald’s and Amazon, said that many companies are trying to mimic many companies to create cross -functional teams that reduce obstacles between Amazon’s coding and marketing workers, such as coding and marketing. In this process, they can discover dismissal and make layoffs.
In a note that explained the layoffs in Starbucks last month, General Manager Brian Niccol, referred to a goal “Removal and reproduction of layers and creating smaller, more agile teams”. Nissan offered a similar reason for management interruptions announced This month.
In general, the latest data from New York Federal Reserve Bank to show The unemployment rate for college graduates increased by 30 percent in September 2022 (from 2 percent to 2.6 percent), compared to approximately 18 percent (from 3.4 percent to 4 percent) for all workers. An analysis by Ziprecruiter’s chief economist, Julia Pollak, shows that unemployment is the highest among those who are undergraduate degrees or a university, but unemployment is at the top and bottom of the education ladder and the bottom and bottom of the education ladder for those who do not have a high school diploma.
Recruitment rates slowed more slowdown than other jobs for jobs that require university degree, According to Adp Researchexamining the labor market.
Some economists say these tendencies can be short -term and concern on their own. Lawrence Katz, a working economist in Harvard, said that the increase in unemployment for workers receiving college training is generally larger than the increase in unemployment, and that unemployment for both groups is low by historical measures.
Professor Katz argued that more slow growth in the wages of upper-middle class workers could reflect a reduction that these workers accepted effectively in exchange for working from home. Data from the Liberal Economic Policy Institute The wages of the workers in the 70th and 8th pendants of the income distribution have grown slower than other groups since 2019.
However, there are other signs that refunds at a university degree can change for a longer period of time. The gap in wages between those with university degrees and those who do not have one It has grown constantly Starting from 1980, it has been flattened in the last 15 years, but remained high.
Flatification can partially reflect the fact that as participation in the university increases, there are more university -educated workers that employers can choose. But some economists to dispute reflects Reduced Need of Employers For university graduates – for example, less work, such as information technology, has become more sophisticated. Such jobs do not necessarily require a university degree, but they once paid a relatively high fee to them because they are often attractive for graduates.
And artificial intelligence can further reduce this need by increasing the automation of white -collar jobs. An end academic article He found that software developers using an AI coding assistant have developed a significant measure of productivity more than 25 percent and that their productivity gains appeared the largest among the least experienced developers. The result suggests that the adoption of AI can reduce the wage premium of more experienced coders, as it will erode the advantages of productivity compared to novices.
Mert Demirer, a MIT economist, a joint author of the article, said in an interview that a software developer’s business may change in the long term, so that the human coder has become a kind of project manager who controls multiple AI assistants. In this case, wages may rise as one becomes more productive. And if cheaper software leads to even more demand, AI can expand employment among the coders.
Nevertheless, at least in the near term, many technology managers and investors see AI as a way to cut staff. A software engineer at a large technology company refused to refuse to be named for fear of harming business expectations, and that his team was about half of the last year, and that he and his colleagues are expected to do the same work by relying on a AI assistant. Generally, unemployment rate Technology and related industries increased from 2022 to 2024, rose from 2.9 percent to 4.4 percent.
Later, Mr. Trump has attempts to reconstruct the federal government, which has resulted in business losses so far, and to reconstruct the federal government for federal employees and employees for universities and other non -profit organizations based on government financing. The University of Johns Hopkins, which is largely based on federal research financing, announced this month that Mr. Trump has dismissed 2,000 workers worldwide.
Professor Katz from Harvard said that a larger part of the workers studying university education depends on the federal government for more work than other groups through the financing of direct or non -profit organizations. “What seems to be a great contraction of the expenditures made by the government – will have a potentially a huge impact on science and research,” he said.
“The general unemployment rate for university graduates does not seem especially high,” he added. “But it may be in the next six months.”
