Layoffs and unemployment grow between graduates

When Starbucks announced last month Which was firing more than 1,000 company employees, he highlighted a disturbing trend for white -collar workers: in recent years they have seen a steep increase in unemployment than other groups e slower salary growth.

Has it also added fuel to a debate that worried the economists for most of that time: are recent working losses simply a temporary development? Or do they report something more disturbing and irreversible?

After staying below 4 percent for more than two years, the overall unemployment rate has exceeded that threshold since May.

Economists say that the labor market remains strong for historical standards and that much of the recent weakening appears connected to the economic impact of the pandemic. The companies assumed aggressively between the growing question, then moved to layoffs once the Federal Reserve began to increase interest rates. Many of these companies have tried to make their operations thinner under the pressure of investors.

But among the rapid progress in artificial intelligence and the targeting of President Trump of the federal agencies, which disproportionately support jobs for white collars, some wonder if a permanent decline has started for the work of knowledge.

“We are witnessing a significant transition in the way the work is carried out in the world of white collars,” said Carl Tannenbaum, head of the economist of Northern Trust. “I tell the people who are coming a wave.”

To date, few industries embody the turn of the last few years better than the creation of video games, which A boom began in 2020 While the Americans linked to the sofa sought new forms of domestic entertainment. The industry has assumed aggressively before reversing the course and embarking on a period of layoffs. Thousands of video game workers lost work last year and the previous year.

The scale of the loss of work was such that the guest of the Game Developer Choice AwardsThe annual show of the annual prizes in the sector has complained about the “record layoffs” during its opening monologue in 2024. That same year, a unionization tendency that had started with more paid quality warranty tester widespread to workers more paid as games of games, designers and engineers of the companies that make the games of success that make the games of success successful Fall AND World of Warcraft.

In Bethesda Game Studios, who is owned by Microsoft and makes repercussions, the workers said they had partially albumped because they were alarmed by the rounding of layoffs at the company in 2023 and 2024 and felt that a union would give them a lever in a softening market market.

“It was the first time that Bethesda had experienced layoffs in a very, very long time,” said Taylor Welling, producer of the study, who achieved a master’s degree in interactive entertainment. “That type of fear.” Microsoft refused to comment.

Unemployment in financial and related industriesAlthough still low, increased by about a quarter from 2022 to 2024, since the increase in interest rates has slowed down the demand for mortgages and companies have tried to become thinner. On a Useful calls Last summer, the CEO of Wells Fargo noticed that the “efficiency initiatives” of the company had been able to prune the company’s work force for 16 consecutive quarters, including a reduction of almost 50 % of workers in the company’s domestic loan division since 2023.

Last autumn, Wells Fargo fired for about a quarter of about 45 employees in his team of hiring of conduct management, which examines the accusations of bad corporate conduct against customers and employees. Heather Rolfes, A lawyer who was letting go, he said he believed that the company was trying to save money by reducing his American workforce and that she and her colleagues were an attractive goal because they had recently tried to unions.

“I think it was fantastic for them to get rid of two birds with a stone,” said Mrs. Rolfes. Some of his former collaborators claim to wait anxiously every Tuesday after a day of pay, because it is then that the company tends to inform workers about work cuts. “We feel like at any time we could be fired,” he said Eden Davis, Another worker of the team.

A spokesman by Wells Fargo declared in a declaration that the layoffs had nothing to do with the union and that “we regularly examine and adapt the levels of staff in line with market conditions”. He noticed that two team managers also lost their jobs.

Atif Rafiq, author of a book on the corporate strategy that held senior positions at McDonald’s and Amazon, said that many companies were trying to emulate the Amazon model to build interfunctional teams that reduce barriers between workers with different skills, such as coding and marketing. In the process, they can discover layoffs and undertake layoffs.

In a reminder that announces the layoffs in Starbucks last month, Brian Niccol, CEO, cited a goal of “removal of levels and duplications and creation of smaller and more agile teams”. Nissan offered a similar logic for management cuts announced This month.

Overall, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York show That the unemployment rate for graduates has increased by 30 percent since he exhausted in September 2022 (at 2.6 percent from 2 percent), compared to about 18 percent for all workers (4 percent from 3.4 percent). An analysis of Julia Pollak, the boss of Ziprecruiter economist, shows that unemployment has been higher among those with a degree or college, but without a degree, while the unemployment was stable or falling at the top and at the bottom of the scale of education – for those with advanced degrees or without a high school diploma.

The hiring rates have slowed down more for the works that require a university diploma than for other works, According to ADP researchwho studies the labor market.

Some economists say that these trends could be of a short -term nature and poor cause of sunglasses. Lawrence Katz, Harvard work economist, observed that the increase in unemployment for educated workers was only modestly larger than the increase in unemployment in general and that unemployment for both groups has remained low for historical measures.

Professor Katz claimed that slower growth of wages for workers in the medium-high class could simply reflect a discount that these workers have actually accepted in exchange for being able to work from home. Data from the Liberal Economic Policy Institute It shows that wages for workers in the 70th and 80th percentile of income distribution have grown more slowly than those of any other group since 2019.

But there are other signs that the return to a university diploma may have moved for a longer period. The gap in wages among those with a university diploma and those without one has grown constantly Starting in 1980, but flattened over the past 15 years, although it remains high.

The flattening may partially reflect the fact that there are more educated workers for employers to choose from, since university frequency has increased. But some economists argue reflecting reduced need for employers For graduates, for example, less jobs such as accounting as information technology have become more sophisticated. These jobs do not necessarily require a university diploma, but they were often attractive for graduates because they once paid them a relatively high salary.

And artificial intelligence could further reduce this necessity by increasing the automation of the work of white collars. A recent Academic document They discovered that the software developers who used a coding assistant Ai improved a key measurement measure of over 25 percent and that productivity gains seemed to be greater among the less experienced developers. The result suggested that the adoption of the AI ​​could reduce the salary prize enjoyed by more experienced programmers, since it would have paid their productivity advantages compared to beginners.

Mert Demirer, a MIT economist who was co -author of the document, said in an interview that the work of a software developer could change in the long term, so that the human programmer has become a sort of project manager who supervises more artificial intelligence assistants. In that case, wages could increase when the human became more productive. And the IA could end up expanding the employment between programmers if a cheaper software has led to an even greater demand.

However, at least in the short term, many technological managers and their investors seem to see the IA as a way To cut the staff. A software engineer of a large technological company that refused to be appointed for fear of damaging his work prospects said that his team was about half of the dimensions that it was last year and that he and his colleagues should have done about the same amount of work by relying on an assistant to AI. Overall, the unemployment rate In the technological and related industries they increased by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4 percent from 2.9 percent.

Then there are the attempts of Mr. Trump to redo the Federal Government, who have so far entailed leaks of jobs and hiring of freezing Federal employees and universities employees and other non -profit organizations that are based on government funding. Johns Hopkins University, which is strongly based on federal research funding, announced This month in which 2,000 workers settled all over the world due to the cuts of Mr. Trump.

Harvard’s Professor Katz observed that a wider part of workers instructed to college depended on the federal government for their work compared to other groups, directly or through the financing of non -profit organizations. “What seems to be a great contraction of spending for science and research, on education, by the government – which will potentially have a very large impact,” he said.

“The overall unemployment rate for graduates does not seem particularly high,” he added. “But it could be in the next six months.”