The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index, a leading indicator for payroll employment, slipped slightly in March to 105.72 from 105.84 in February, with five of its eight components contributing negatively. The share of consumers saying jobs are "hard to get" climbed to 21.5% in March, up 5 percentage points from a year ago. The share of involuntary part-time workers rose to 16.5%, though that figure has improved from the 19.4% recorded in December.
Initial unemployment claims continued to trend down, averaging 207,800 in March compared to a 2025 average of 226,450 — a sign that layoffs remain historically low even as hiring stays sluggish.
Read more via The Conference Board
ADP's Employee Motivation and Commitment Index fell in March for the seventh consecutive month, dropping to 129 — its lowest level since April 2025. Chief economist Nela Richardson notes that the decline matters beyond how workers feel in the moment: in 2025, workers who felt their jobs were safe were six times more likely to be fully engaged and 3.3 times more likely to report high productivity.
Read more via ADP Research
The Commerce Department's final reading of Q4 2025 GDP came in at 0.5% annualized growth, a downgrade from the prior estimate of 0.7% and a sharp deceleration from 4.4% growth in Q3. The 43-day government shutdown last fall was a significant drag, cutting 1.16 percentage points off fourth-quarter growth as federal spending and investment fell at a 16.6% annual pace. For all of 2025, the economy grew 2.1%, slower than 2.8% in 2024 and 2.9% in 2023.
The job market was volatile in early 2026: 160,000 jobs added in January, 133,000 lost in February, then a surprising 178,000 added in March — with unemployment ticking back down to 4.3%. New unemployment filings jumped by 16,000 last week but remain within the normal range of recent years.
The labor market remains in a low-hire, low-fire holding pattern. Disney is the latest major employer reported to be preparing cuts, with the Wall Street Journal reporting plans to eliminate 1,000 positions. The first look at Q1 2026 GDP is due April 30, with the economic outlook clouded by elevated energy prices and ongoing uncertainty around the Iran conflict. Oil prices briefly fell after a two-week ceasefire was announced before skepticism about its durability pushed them back near $100 a barrel.
Read more via AP, Fox Business
A new Goldman Sachs report tracking more than 20,000 workers over four decades finds that people who lose jobs in fields disrupted by technology face lasting economic harm — a warning sign for workers in AI-exposed roles today.
Workers displaced from tech-disrupted occupations take a month longer to find new jobs than peers displaced from other fields, and earn 3% less in real wages after landing new work. Over the decade following job loss, tech-displaced workers see their real earnings grow nearly 10 percentage points less than workers who never lost a job, and 5 percentage points less than workers displaced in other industries — largely because their skills become less valuable in new roles.
The pain is worse during recessions: workers who lose automation-vulnerable jobs during a downturn face an additional three weeks of unemployment and higher odds of future joblessness. Workers displaced between ages 25 and 35 are less likely to marry and more likely to delay milestones like homeownership.
One nuance worth noting: younger and college-educated workers actually adjust more flexibly than older peers, with cumulative earnings losses roughly half as large. Contrary to widespread concern, the costs of AI displacement don't appear to fall especially hard on new graduates — at least based on how past technological disruptions have played out.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
For years, economists largely brushed off warnings about AI-driven job losses, attributing rising graduate unemployment to interest rates and calling corporate "AI layoffs" mostly a cover for mismanagement. That skepticism is softening — and the shift is notable because economists have historically been among the most grounded voices in automation debates.
Most economists still don't see clear evidence that AI has disrupted the labor market yet, but a new working paper surveying economists finds growing consensus that disruption is coming and that policymakers are unprepared for it.
Several economists cited specific recent AI capabilities — including reasoning models and agentic coding tools — as the moment their thinking shifted. One Brookings Institution researcher said she realized she no longer needed entry-level research assistants for work that AI could now do. A new Boston Consulting Group report estimates more than half of U.S. jobs will be "reshaped" by AI in the next two to three years, though far fewer will be replaced entirely in the near term. Speed is the key variable: a gradual shift gives workers time to adapt, while a rapid one does not.
Read more via The New York Times, Semafor
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, both using occupation-level data to separate jobs by AI exposure, reach a similar and notably measured conclusion: AI has raised the overall unemployment rate by about 0.1 percentage point. That's real, but far smaller than doomsday predictions suggest. Goldman found AI slightly increased unemployment in roles easily substituted by the technology, while actually decreasing unemployment in roles where AI augments rather than replaces human work — those requiring judgment, interpersonal interaction, or accountability.
One caveat from Morgan Stanley: companies are talking about AI displacing workers far more than they're talking about AI driving new hiring. But the bank suggests executives may be telling a story investors want to hear — markets are rewarding cost-cutting narratives, which creates a strong incentive for firms to frame efficiency programs as AI-driven.
Read more via Axios
More than 300,000 federal jobs have been cut since 2024, and the ripple effects are reshaping the D.C. labor market in ways that go well beyond government workers. The city's unemployment rate has hit 6.7% — the highest in the U.S. and the highest locally since 2015 excluding the pandemic.
Job postings in D.C. are 30% below pre-pandemic levels, the softest of any state in the country, according to Indeed. The damage extends well beyond federal employees to contractors, nonprofits, and service businesses that depend on government workers as customers. 123 private companies in the D.C. area announced job cuts in 2025, affecting more than 13,000 workers — the highest annual total since the pandemic.
Many displaced workers report being told they're overqualified, taking significant pay cuts, or stepping into junior roles after senior careers. Some are leaving the city entirely, citing the difficulty of sustaining a job search in one of the most expensive cities in the country. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in D.C. is $3,100 a month.
Read more via The Guardian
Years of denial are giving way to capitulation in the commercial real estate market, with distressed office buildings selling at discounts of 50% to 90% or more across major U.S. cities. Sales of foreclosed and bankrupt office properties reached $5.2 billion last year as lenders and owners finally accept that remote and hybrid work have permanently changed office demand.
A Chicago building that sold for $68 million a decade ago just changed hands for $4 million. Denver's Energy Center, which sold for $176 million in 2013, went for $5.3 million. Even higher-quality office properties have dropped about 35% from peak values on average. Rock-bottom prices are accelerating residential conversions — more than 90,000 apartments were in the process of conversion nationwide at the start of the year, up 28% from a year earlier. One Chicago buyer is converting a building into an urban farm and education center.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
For workers who have already navigated desktop publishing, the internet, and smartphones, AI is proving to be one disruption too many. The share of Americans over 55 in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, its lowest level in more than 20 years.
About 30% of workers ages 30 to 49 use ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. Baby boomers and Gen X workers showed the sharpest declines in confidence using AI, per a ManpowerGroup survey of nearly 14,000 workers across 19 countries. The issue isn't just learning new tools — older workers describe AI as disrupting their sense of professional autonomy and identity in ways that feel different from past technology waves.
Employers who are already under pressure to reduce headcount may not be fighting these departures very hard. ManpowerGroup's chief strategy officer put it plainly: "We as employers aren't doing a good enough job saying to older workers, we value the skills you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better."
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
If you've ever dreaded a corporate retreat, consider what happened when streaming company Plex took its 120 fully remote employees to Honduras in 2017 for a "Survivor"-themed bonding week. The CEO got E. coli from a salad before the first bus arrived. A former Navy SEAL ran military drills in 100-degree heat until people started passing out. A software engineer found a porcupine in his shower. Two planes got stranded on a small island after dark. One employee got an antihistamine shot in the backside after landing on a fire ant hill. The whole thing cost about $500,000. Nearly a decade later, the employees still work together and describe it as one of the most fun trips they've ever taken.
Read the full story via The Wall Street Journal
With hiring budgets tight and every role under scrutiny, a growing number of companies are upgrading their workforces by swapping out lower performers for stronger ones rather than adding new positions. Recruiters are calling it "bullseye hiring," and say 2025 was the biggest year for the trend in recent memory.
The logic is straightforward: a company with 10 underperforming sales reps can often get better results by replacing the weakest ones with stronger hires, even at slightly higher pay, than by expanding the team. The trend runs from entry-level to the C-suite — roughly 11% of CEOs at the 1,500 largest public companies were replaced last year, the highest turnover rate since 2010, with boards showing less patience for leaders slow to adapt to an AI-driven future.
Early-career workers face a particular risk, competing not just against each other but against annual cohorts of new graduates entering the same roles. Some companies are effectively "always hiring" — not to grow, but to continuously upgrade. Recruiters say there is "just no appetite for mediocrity anymore."
Read more via Business Insider
Job fraud cost Americans at least $220 million in just the first half of 2024, according to the FTC — and most fraud goes unreported, making the true figure likely far higher. AI is making scams harder to detect and easier to scale, with fraudsters using deepfakes, fake voices, and microtargeting to impersonate real employers and recruiters.
Job scammers typically pose as employers, promise flexibility and high pay via unsolicited texts or emails, and ask targets to pay upfront for equipment that never arrives or hand over personal information. The proliferation of remote work has made job seekers less likely to question red flags like the absence of an in-person interview. Investment scams powered by AI cost consumers more than $5 billion according to the FTC's latest data; job scams accounted for roughly $750 million of total fraud losses. Experts note the high number of job scams right now may be a direct result of the soft labor market.
While large majorities across corporate, manager, and hourly roles describe themselves as engaged, 40% to 46% say they're likely to look for a new job within the year, according to a new Firstup survey of more than 3,000 U.S. and Canadian workers. The disconnect suggests engagement scores alone are no longer a reliable predictor of retention.
61% to 67% of workers across all roles say they've missed an important policy or procedural update in the past year, and half of managers and hourly workers say their employer doesn't have an effective way to share information with them. Managers are the most trusted source of information across the board, but 70% report challenges communicating with hourly teams, and only 29% feel confident their communication keeps workers compliant.
Hourly workers are significantly more likely than corporate employees to believe AI could improve communication (42% vs. 30%) — but 60% have never used AI at work.
Read more via Firstup
A new Centegix survey of more than 600 patient-facing healthcare workers finds that 28% worry about their safety at least once a week and another 15% at least once a month. Most say their organizations aren't treating worker safety as a high priority.
68% said they had experienced at least one violent or threatening incident in the past year, including physical abuse, threats, and intimidating behavior. 48% said safety concerns are affecting their ability to deliver patient care, rising to 63% among hospital workers specifically. 61% said their organization's security efforts don't demonstrate a high priority for worker well-being. When asked what would help most, 55% said additional security personnel and 42% identified duress alert buttons as their top technology choice — though most said they didn't want buttons used to track their location beyond emergency situations.
Read more via Chief Healthcare Executive
Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from a peak of 23% in 2022, driven almost entirely by a nine-point drop in manager engagement over that period, according to Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report. Employees whose managers actively support AI are 8.7 times more likely to say AI has transformed how much work gets done.
A separate AMA survey found a striking perception gap: 59% of managers believe their own engagement increased over the past year, while 80% of employees said it stagnated or declined. Recent middle management layoffs are making things worse, leaving remaining managers stretched thin at exactly the moment when employees need more guidance.
A new McLean & Co. report adds another data point: employees who clearly understand their job expectations are 8.6 times more likely to be engaged at work, yet many organizations still rely on performance criteria that are overly generic, complex, or disconnected from how work actually gets done. Organizations that didn't provide positive employee experiences saw voluntary turnover rates 40% higher than those that did.
Read more via HR Dive
More than half of adults believe men have more opportunities for competitive wages than women, according to a new AP-NORC poll of 1,156 adults. 54% believe men have more opportunities for competitive wages and 51% say men have more opportunities for job advancement. About three in five employed women say men have more opportunities for both, compared to roughly 40% of employed men who agree.
30% of employed women say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender, compared to 10% of employed men. Women are also more likely to say they've missed out on a promotion or recognition at work (24% vs. 16%), and significantly more likely to report financial stress across the board — including pay, housing, groceries, healthcare, and utility costs.
The uncontrolled gender pay gap widened slightly in 2026, with women now earning $0.82 per dollar earned by men, down from $0.83 last year, according to Payscale. In hospitality and food service, the gap is even larger at roughly $0.70 on the dollar. According to Glassdoor, women's earnings typically plateau in their late 30s while men's continue growing through their 40s.
Read more via HR Dive, AP-NORC
Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview last week, describing it as the most capable AI model ever built — and simultaneously announcing it would not be made available to the public. The reason: it can autonomously find and exploit security vulnerabilities in ways that could be catastrophic in the wrong hands.
During testing, Mythos found zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, discovered a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD that had survived decades of human review, and autonomously chained Linux kernel vulnerabilities together to gain complete machine control. Developing a full root exploit from a known vulnerability cost under $1,000 and took half a day.
In one unsettling test, a researcher asked the model to find a way to escape its sandbox and send a message if it succeeded. It did — then went further without being asked, posting exploit details to public-facing websites. The researcher found out when he received an unexpected email from the model while eating lunch in a park.
Anthropic is making Mythos available only to roughly 40 vetted organizations through Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity defense initiative. Launch partners include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, and the Linux Foundation. Competitors are expected to reach similar capabilities within six to 18 months, which Anthropic says is precisely why defenders need a head start now.
Read more via Axios, Forbes, MSN
AI's impact on workers without college degrees has been largely overlooked in public debate — and the risk goes beyond individual jobs, according to a new Brookings Institution report. AI threatens to fracture entire career pathways that have historically allowed lower-wage workers to advance.
More than 15 million workers without college degrees are currently in jobs with high AI exposure. About 11 million of those hold "Gateway" jobs — the middle-rung roles that connect entry-level work to better-paying careers. Gateway jobs most at risk are concentrated in clerical and administrative work, which is also disproportionately held by women. Customer service representatives, secretaries, and accounting clerks are among the roles most likely to be disrupted.
Workers without degrees account for more than 62% of people in Gateway jobs across the workforce, making this group central to the broader employment pipeline. If those jobs disappear, the pipeline of experienced workers for higher-level roles disappears with them. About a third of these workers have low adaptive capacity, meaning they will likely struggle most to adjust if displaced. "AI is not just reshaping the software developers," said one report co-author. "This is coming to every community."
Read more via Fast Company, Brookings Institution
A three-year Wharton/GBK Collective study of business leaders at U.S. companies with revenues above $50 million finds a significant gap between how senior executives and middle managers experience AI — one that researchers say explains why less than 10% of companies are capturing meaningful AI value at scale despite heavy investment.
45% of executives report significantly positive ROI from AI investments; among middle managers, that drops to 27%. 56% of executives believe their company is adopting AI faster than competitors — only 28% of middle managers agree. Nearly two-thirds of executives say they've become "much more positive" about generative AI over the past year; only 39% of middle managers say the same.
The gap exists partly because executives use AI for strategic synthesis and decision support, where it performs well, while middle managers are responsible for deploying it in messy day-to-day operations with uneven teams, legacy workflows, and zero tolerance for errors. Middle managers are also already overloaded: McKinsey research shows they spend less than 30% of their time on people leadership, with nearly half consumed by administrative work. Handing them an AI mandate without reducing that load first is, as one executive coach put it, "asking them to build the plane while flying it."
Read more via Harvard Business Review
A McKinsey senior partner argues that most organizations are making the same two mistakes: treating all work the same when applying AI, and spreading investment too thin rather than concentrating it where it creates the most value. The result is a lot of activity with little impact.
For every dollar spent on AI technology, organizations need to invest roughly two dollars in change management, capability building, and adoption to actually realize the benefits. 70% of human skills remain essential even in heavily AI-augmented environments, and the productivity upside — which McKinsey pegs at $4.4 trillion globally — only materializes for organizations that treat the people side of transformation as seriously as the technology side.
Perhaps the most candid finding: no function within most organizations currently owns the job of creating, managing, tuning, and eventually retiring AI agents. "This will become a new organizational capability in the future," said McKinsey's Senthil Muthiah. "As of now, there is no clear view on who should own this."
Read more via UC Today
Two organizations that did get out of pilot mode offer a useful contrast. At MassMutual, developer productivity increased 30%, IT help desk resolution times declined from 11 minutes to one, and customer service calls were cut from 15 minutes to one or two. The key was refusing to move to production until metrics were defined and a business partner signed off. Mass General Brigham took the opposite approach at first — letting pilots proliferate without governance, then course-correcting by shutting most of them down. A pivotal realization: they were building in-house tools that their existing vendors, including Epic, Workday, and Microsoft, were already planning to provide. In clinical settings, the guardrails are absolute: AI never issues a final decision — a physician always closes the loop.
Read more via Harvard Business Review, VentureBeat
A Clayton County prosecutor admitted to using AI to draft legal briefs that contained at least five fabricated case citations and several misrepresented ones. The district attorney formally apologized to the Georgia Supreme Court, and the prosecutor faces potential discipline and State Bar referral.
About 60% of judges are believed to be using AI in some capacity, according to one legal tech expert, for tasks ranging from legal research to drafting and case analysis. The legal responsibility is clear: attorneys are accountable for everything they submit, AI-generated or not. The Georgia State Bar has reminded lawyers that AI cannot replace their professional judgment and that they remain responsible for verifying all AI-generated work.
Read more via CBS Atlanta
Accountants are still shivering through frozen fish warehouses — and desperately hoping AI will save them. Despite widespread AI adoption in accounting and auditing, there's still no technological substitute for sending junior auditors into grain bins, freezers, snake-infested quarries, and chicken coops to manually count things. Auditors describe ending up covered in corn dust, manure, and fertilizer. "I think AI can count something faster than a human can, so you can see it coming," said KPMG's U.S. assurance leader. For now, though, it remains a rite of passage for young accountants. (The Wall Street Journal)
Manufacturers are using AI translation tools to communicate with workers who don't speak English. A growing number of U.S. manufacturers are deploying AI-driven translation technology to bridge language gaps on the production floor — including real-time captioning at company meetings, translated safety signage, and smart earpieces for supervisors. Manufacturers employ roughly 3.1 million foreign-born workers, representing about 20% of the industry, and businesses lose an estimated $500,000 per year on average in hidden labor costs tied to ad-hoc translation practices. (HR Dive)
Utah is letting an AI chatbot renew certain psychiatric prescriptions. Under a new pilot agreement with Legion Health, Utah is allowing an AI system to authorize renewals for a limited set of psychiatric maintenance medications, including common antidepressants like fluoxetine and sertraline. The chatbot cannot diagnose, start new treatment, change doses, or switch medications — and any case involving suicidality, worsening symptoms, or pregnancy must be escalated to a human provider. Utah is framing the agreement as regulatory mitigation, not endorsement. (TechRepublic)
Germany: One in five young Germans between the ages of 14 and 29 are actively planning to leave the country, according to a new nationally representative survey, with 41% saying they could imagine moving abroad in the longer term. Respondents cited economic stagnation, rising housing costs, weak career prospects in the face of AI, and the rise of far-right politics as primary drivers. The findings reflect what the study's director called "a dramatic sense of a lack of prospects" among German youth. (Deutsche Welle)
Mexico: Mexico's government is projecting 2.4% GDP growth in 2027, a modest improvement from an expected 2.3% in 2026, but the outlook comes with significant fiscal tightening. A 26.8% drop in oil revenues is forcing a 4.1% cut in public spending, while the government works to achieve a primary budget surplus for the first time in years. External risks include the USMCA trade agreement review and the potential impact of sustained Middle East conflict on global oil prices. (Mexico Business News)
Poland: Poland's economy is 42% larger today than it would have been had the country not joined the European Union in 2004, according to new analysis by the Polish Economic Institute — a finding that comes as debate about a potential "Polexit" has gained unexpected traction, with up to a quarter of respondents in some polls expressing support for leaving the bloc. (Notes from Poland)
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