A Trump administration official said that the job market is on the right track and presented one piece of context often left out when analyzing the unemployment rate.
For many young people like myself who recently lost jobs or are still struggling to find full-time employment after four years of Bidenomics, it often seems as if the job market has not improved at all. But Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer insisted on Fox Business that the job market is improving and that the reason the rate of unemployment has risen is at least partly because more Americans are looking for jobs. The unemployment rate reflects those actively seeking employment, which she says has gone up during the first year of the Trump administration.
While on Mornings with Maria, Chavez-DeRemer declared, “The president has created over 650,000 jobs since he took office in the private sector and most to native-born Americans. That is positive for the American economy.”
She continued, “When we count [the] unemployment rate, you have to be looking for a job. Well, this tells us that more people are getting off the sidelines, and they're looking for those jobs. And that's the exciting part.”
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The Trump administration has, of course, cut government jobs, but it is also working to galvanize the private sector after four years of Democrat policies and the economy-killing COVID-19 lockdowns.
Chavez-DeRemer emphasized, “So, more people in the workforce looking, that unemployment might tick up. But I think the exciting parts were creating those new jobs with all the investments in Make America Skilled Again. Despite a 43-day shutdown by these Democrats, the president's momentum has not stopped.”
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Fox Business reports, "On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that employers added 64,000 jobs in November – more than economists expected – while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6%, the highest since September 2021."
Chavez-DeRemer denied that artificial intelligence has anything to do with the unemployment rate increase and speculated on a different possible explanation: “It's not a function of AI, again, because we want to make sure that we're answering the call, these market demands. Post-COVID, there [were] a lot of companies who increased their employee growth numbers. And maybe they're laying off for those reasons, and they have to answer that to the American people.”
The Labor secretary also discussed what the Trump administration rightly sees as a major solution to the difficult job market: “What we're doing is focusing on the apprenticeship program,” she explained. “We've registered almost 300,000 new apprentices. We're answering the call for 700,000 jobs in electricians, machinists, plumbers, pipe fitters.”
She circled back to AI: “We want to make sure the trades are prepared and that we can build the data centers that are going to make the call to AI. It's not just the coders, it's just not the software developers. We think about the data centers that are being built, we need the skilled tradesmen and craftsmen in this country,” she added. In fact, we need skilled craftsmen for a lot more than AI data centers.
So while it is still a difficult job market out there, there is reason to think the future will be better.