The Jobs Report Is a Wake-Up Call

Commentary

We might have hoped we would be done with all the business upheaval, job insecurity, and wild uncertainties of the past six years, mostly stemming from the shocking decision to “lock down” human activity. Sadly, that is not the case.

A new energy crisis appears to be upon us unless the war in Iran finds a quick solution. Otherwise we are looking at gas at $5 per gallon and oil at more than $100, which could easily kick a vulnerable economy into a serious downturn.

The vulnerability is revealed in the jobs report of March 6, 2026, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was far worse than expected. Let us hope it is a wake-up call to Washington.

What did the report say? Employers shed 92,000 positions for the month of February, even as the unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4 percent. December and January jobs growth was revised down by 69,000.

The more alarming fact (which you can peruse at B-1) is that these losses were unconstrained.

In addition to health-sector losses, we have:

• Leisure and hospitality: Down 27,000 jobs, including accommodation and food services down 34,700, indicating ongoing weakness or contraction in consumer-facing services.
• Transportation and warehousing: Down 11,300 jobs, with couriers and messengers seeing a steep drop of 16,600.
• Information sector: Down 11,000 jobs, including movies and sound recording industries down 9,500.
• Administrative and support services (within professional and business services): Down 14,300 jobs, signaling problems in business support.
• Manufacturing: Down 12,000 jobs (with nondurable goods down 8,000).
• Construction: Down 11,000 jobs.

None of these sectors had fully recovered from the body blow of 2020, as small businesses were forcibly shut and large businesses shot up their employees with an experimental potion. All enterprises have struggled ever since. But with high tariffs and soaring costs of health insurance hitting in 2025, it was just too much.

There’s nothing to be gained by blaming artificial intelligence. The majority of these are not jobs artificial intelligence can do. Labor costs eat into profitability, so maintaining it requires offloading as much as possible to deal with hard times.

More revealing are the numbers of employment/population ratios. They were dealt a huge hit with lockdowns, obviously, and have not regained their strength since 2019. It amounts to a permanent downshift. Every time we see gains here, the gravity of the economic environment pushes them down again.

The chart itself makes for a salient picture, a huge gash into labor markets, resulting in many permanently sidelined and many having left the labor force permanently. You cannot just “close the economy” without long-lasting consequences.

The bad news is further confirmed by the labor participation rate, which is down for the third month in a row. Again, this never recovered from the lockdowns. Workers were displaced and alienated from their jobs, and many took stimulus payments and retired on accumulated savings. As a result, we have low levels of population participation in the basic activity of remunerative work.

Among many existing workers, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in people listed as disabled. You might think this is partially due to higher benefit offerings and probably some degree of fraud. But you might also consider that vaccine injury is far more extensive than people know. We have myriad laws and vast funding in this country attempting to deal with the disabled. There are more now than ever on record.

The higher gas prices are in the news, and the culprit is the war on Iran, which has disturbed shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. But there is another factor here rarely mentioned. Refining capacity in the United States never recovered from lockdowns.

Before, the previous peak was 19 million barrels per calendar day. That dropped in 2021 to 18.1 million and further to 17.9 million in 2022. We are still 0.5–0.6 million below the pre-lockdown peak, meaning that any disruption was destined to have a big effect on oil prices and prices at the pump.

That disruption came with the Iran war. As for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that was already tapped out during the last lockdown-driven and inflation-induced price spike. The low prices of 2025 could not last with any stress on production structures.

And speaking of inflation, that lockdown-triggered money flood from 2020–2023 ended up taking a 30–40 percent bite out of the dollar’s purchasing power, causing a flattening of wages and salaries in real terms, even as housing prices skyrocketed far beyond middle-class affordability. Groceries never came back to being affordable again.

Manufacturing was devastated during the COVID-19 years with global supply-chain disruptions. Trump came to office a second time determined to fix this but chose the blunt instrument of tariffs, which are higher now than in a century. The effect of these has been not to lower the trade deficit but rather to increase it (the opposite of what was supposed to happen), even as manufacturing employment continues to fall.

Other indicators of economic health provide only illusory gains. Once adjusted for the devastating inflation, they largely vanish. So it is with retail sales, tracked carefully by E.J. Antoni, which were rising in real terms before lockdowns, jumped up with stimulus cash, but have stayed flat in the post-lockdown period.

One of the strangest features of the lockdowns is how crazy, cockamamie, convoluted data reports, on and off again—all of which were distorted by $10 trillion in stimulus and money creation—caused business-cycle tracking to become nearly impossible. Trends of a century or more became mired in a mess of countervailing forces such that it became nearly impossible to know what was a downturn and what was recovery.

The jobs report from last week had the word recession all over it, but we do not and cannot know for sure, or even whether we ever truly left recession from 2020, at least in any sustainable way. We are still digging our way out of this, only to get hit because of health-insurance shocks, import taxes, and more supply-chain disruptions stemming from war.

Features of our times not only look like the prolongation of the lockdowns but are actually analogous, almost like they never go away. Hence the economic uncertainty index, which parallels levels in 2020 and 2008.

Other signs of trouble include liquidity constraints from the huge financial firm BlackRock, whose stock valuation was hit hard after throttling withdrawals from some of its key accounts.

This is only a brief look at some economic indicators, and they all point to a disappointing economic weakness, deep structural problems, and much more work to do to restore economic vibrancy following years of turbulence.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.