US adds 130,000 jobs in January, more than expected
U.S. employers added 130,000 jobs in January, more than expected, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%.
cheddar
This article was created by Capital & Main. Published with permission.
Being laid off can leave you in a state of uncertainty for months. But what happens when those months turn into years? When Jacob Sandy quit his job as a software engineer in December 2023, he never imagined he’d be without a job for more than two years.
At the time, the tech industry was undergoing massive layoffs in response to overemployment during the pandemic. Sandy’s employer, which provides a cloud computing platform that helps automate business workflows, declined to cut jobs across the board. But he said he began to suspect that the employer wanted the employee to quit voluntarily.
“I felt like they made it miserable and wanted us to leave,” said Sandy, who lives in San Diego with her school-age son. “And for whatever reason, we decided that was the better option.”
Sandy said her first year of unemployment was largely her own choice, and that while not having a job was initially good for her mental health, it ultimately wasn’t.
“I had been preparing financially for a year in advance, but I guess after about six months I started thinking about it quite lightly,” he said. “But what I realized was that all the recruiting systems at that time were starting to switch to more automated systems, AI-influenced systems, so I was completely ghosted by every application.”
Employment is slowing for workers in all sectors. January’s jobs report showed stronger-than-expected growth, but a closer look at newly updated government figures reveals an anemic employment rate, with employers adding just 181,000 jobs last year, and more than a million fewer jobs than previously thought. The unemployment rate also rose slightly to 4.3% from 4.0% the previous year.
“Today’s hiring rates are very similar to the hiring rates during the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “And we can clearly see that the labor market has softened over the last few years. We’ve seen a pretty significant slowdown in the growth of salaried employment.”With few hirings and few layoffs, the stagnant job market has made it difficult for the unemployed to find another job. One in four unemployed people are considered long-term unemployed, meaning they have been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, the highest rate since the pandemic.
Akira Adams, an Atlanta-based executive assistant who has been looking for work since June 2025, echoed Sandy’s frustrations with the lackluster job market.
“Right now, it’s a completely different market than any I’ve been unemployed in,” said Adams, who worries she may have to settle for a lower-paying job. She encountered several scams during her job search. This included an interview with an AI chatbot that offered on-the-spot employment in exchange for personal information.
Adams, a black woman in her early 40s, said she faces additional barriers to finding work because of her race and age. And the unemployment numbers confirm her concerns. As of early 2025, the unemployment rate for Black women was 5.4%. By December, that rate had risen to 7.3%, the highest rate in four years and nearly three percentage points above the national average of 4.4%.
Black women, who make up the majority of federal employees, have been hit hard by recent federal cuts. Losses in manufacturing and professional and business services industries, where women work disproportionately, also added pressure. The withdrawal from DEI initiatives within and outside of government may also have affected the employment prospects of Black women.
Adams said many black women she knows are responding to the volatile job market by starting their own businesses and monetizing their skills. Within a month of losing her job, she started an LLC and offered her services as a remote assistant, but the business was slow to take off. In January, she had one client who kept her busy for about two hours a week. “So that definitely won’t pay the bill,” she said.
Adams also competes with workers around the world who can offer much lower rates. She had seen an ad for a remote assistant based in the Philippines, where workers earn significantly less than in the United States.
While Adams has the support of her husband, who works full time, others are not so lucky.
For Charlotte Wilson Langley, a children’s writer in Los Angeles, her options for continuing to make a living are rapidly diminishing as neither she nor her husband have stable jobs.
Last Christmas, Wilson-Langley was applying for retail jobs without success. She has been said to be overqualified. In the meantime, she’s living on credit and selling clothes on Poshmark to make ends meet.
“Every time we were able to make rent last year, it felt like a miracle,” Wilson Langley said.
Wilson Langley spent years trying to break into the entertainment industry, eventually landing a job on the writing staff of a Disney series in early 2022. However, when the season ended the following year, she was unable to find further television work. Since then, she’s been combining it with part-time jobs, including handing out juice samples at Costco.
She laments the lack of support for people suffering from long-term unemployment. California’s maximum unemployment benefit is $450 a week, but that doesn’t even cover the cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, where the average rent is well over $2,700 a month.
At one point, Wilson Langley’s unemployment benefits ran out, leaving her without assistance for six months. “It’s not working and it’s letting people down,” she said.
Saba Waheed, director of the UCLA Labor Center, said a stronger social safety net could help people suffering from long-term unemployment, especially in the wake of industry-wide changes.
Waheed said policymakers can learn from the government’s response to massive job losses due to coronavirus-era shutdowns and could apply some of the same tactics to help workers suffering long-term unemployment. She proposed enacting an eviction moratorium and extending unemployment benefits as a way to create a safety net for all workers.
“Some of the strategies used during COVID-19 were actually very helpful,” Waheed said.
For Jacob Sandy, the software industry, once seen as a growth field and offering high-paying jobs, no longer seems like a surefire option. He worries about changes in his profession, including the impact of artificial intelligence on work.
After months of looking for work, depressed and desperate, he considers changing industries all together. “I’m thinking about doing an apprenticeship as an electrician or going into one of those fields because those fields always seem to be in demand,” he said.
Ccopyright 2026 Capital and main
