FEATURED POST
October 15, 2025
AI isn’t just changing work. It might be changing workers.
AI isn’t just changing work. It might be changing workers. Our latest research finds that frequent use of the technology aligns with differences in how people think and feel about their jobs.
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October 14, 2025
The big stay is sticking
More than two years ago, I wrote that the Great Resignation had become the big stay, with fewer workers leaving their jobs. Since then, staying put has become a mainstay of the labor market. In August, employee quits were down 14 percent from their pre-pandemic levels and 32 percent from their peak during the Great Resignation. With the big stay sticking, let’s take a fresh look at private-sector turnover and pay.
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October 7, 2025
Jobs and data: Here’s where the two meet
We had a rare event last week. On jobs Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released no data because of the government shutdown. With no news, market watchers and the media had time on their hands, so we spent the day fielding questions about ADP’s monthly National Employment Report. Here’s a roundup of the questions we got and how we answered them. But first, a quick primer.
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September 23, 2025
The pay gap is getting bigger
In 2024, my colleague Liv Wang and I took a deep dive into the earnings gap. We found that the pandemic had triggered strong pay gains among the lowest wage-earners, those at the bottom quartile of the distribution. For this group, for a while, the pace of pay growth was more than double that of the highest earners.
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September 16, 2025
The job market is telling us something about consumers
Consumers are the heartbeat of the U.S. economy, accounting for two-thirds of its growth. But let’s not forget that most of those consumers don’t just spend. They also work. And lately, the symbiosis between the job market and retail spending is getting more entwined.
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September 9, 2025
Behind the big picture
Last week’s economic data delivered new evidence that employment has slowed in 2025. But there’s more to the job market than the pace of hiring. Pay growth, hours worked, and productivity are combining to make the jobs picture more complex than the sum of its parts. Here is a look at how these three components operate in the background of the labor market and how they can shift the economic landscape.
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August 19, 2025
In a transition, small changes add up
This week, the Federal Reserve holds its annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where some 120 central bankers, finance leaders, and academics gather to discuss important global issues. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell caps the meeting with a much-anticipated speech on Friday. For Main Street, there’s more to this gathering than Powell’s 20-minutes address that, by design, isn’t likely to articulate what’s next for interest rates. That’s a topic for another day.
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August 12, 2025
New hires, old pay
In recent months, pay has grown at a relatively steady pace for both job-stayers and job-changers for the past several months. But this data tracks only two subsets of the working population. If we zoom out to get a bigger picture, we see that pay for new hires—that big group of people who are brand new to a particular employer—has been stagnant for more than a year. When it comes to pay, new hires are in a rut.
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July 22, 2025
The pandemic changed the U.S. labor market. Here’s how.
It’s been five years since Covid-19 lockdowns brought parts of the U.S. economy to a halt. While the crisis has passed, its impact on the labor market, especially wages, is still unfolding.
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