The job market is healing for everyone—except in the office
The April jobs report showed America is hiring again at the strongest pace in over a year, but white-collar sectors keep shedding workers, and AI may be part of why.
The U.S. labor market added 115,000 jobs in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, beating economist expectations and marking the second straight month of gains. The unemployment rate held at 4.3%.
After a 2025 where monthly job growth averaged an anemic 10,000, the 2026 average is now 76,000—enough of an improvement that economists are starting to ask whether the “hiring recession” of the past two years is finally ending.
For much of the labor market, the answer looks like yes. Health care added 37,000 jobs, transportation and warehousing added 30,000, and social assistance trended up. For two years, essentially the only jobs that were hiring were in the public sector and healthcare, until DOGE gutted the federal workforce and left healthcare to do it alone.
Now labor market gains are broadening. Bill Adams, chief U.S. economist at Fifth Third Commercial Bank, wrote in a note that the job market is “inching out of low hire, low fire mode into moderate hire, low fire mode.”
But there is one corner of the economy excluded from that: the office.
The “information sector”—where the BLS counts tech, telecom, data processing, and media jobs—lost another 13,000 jobs in April, while finance shed 11,000. The monthly average this year has been about 9,000 jobs lost in information, and 12,000 in financial activities.
Kevin Gordon, senior investment strategist at Charles Schwab, flagged on X Friday that information payrolls have now fallen to their lowest level since March 2021—wiping out four years of sector gains—and have logged 16 consecutive months of net job loss. That is one of the longest peacetime declines in any major sector in modern labor data.
A closer look into the particular sectors’ suffering is revealing. Telecom shed 3,000 jobs, motion picture and sound recording lost 6,000 jobs, and the category that covers cloud and data infrastructure providers lost another 4,000.
That last sector is supposed to be the part of the economy artificial intelligence is building up. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have collectively committed roughly $725 billion to AI infrastructure this year alone, yet the workers who run those data centers are still getting cut out of payrolls.
Could this be because AI is replacing those jobs? Economists remain cautious about drawing a straight line from AI to the white-collar declines. Companies announcing AI-attributed layoffs may be using the technology as cover for to cut costs after over-hiring during the pandemic. But as Gordon noted, it is remarkable that even as tech stocks reach record highs, tech jobs relative to all jobs remain at record lows.
Wages are also getting squeezed. The April jobs report shows average hourly earnings rose 3.6% over the year, while inflation is expected to come in around 4% for April once the Consumer Price Index lands next week, pushed higher by the war in Iran and gas prices that have crossed $4.55 a gallon.
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, predicted that real average hourly earnings will likely register flat to negative for April and “definitely negative” once May’s data arrives, as the supply shock from the Middle East war works its way fully through the economy.
As Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, put it on X: “Workers have jobs, but this is a squeeze.”
