What’s going on with the economy?
The pundits all over the news tell us the market is booming. Even Trump’s recently fired Attorney General, Pam Bondi, screamed the Dow was at 50,000 as she was grilled by a congressional committee looking into the Epstein scandals. Everyone from the president to Wall Street analysts to status quo economists to congressional representatives laud the remarkable rise of the market! To this class of individuals, “the stock market” is the economy. And AI is the reason the stock market is booming. The only reason.
But most of us do not own stocks. We make our living working for wages. Many of us work two and even three jobs. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to make ends meet! The only markets we’re concerned with are the labor market and the market where we buy our necessities that we need to survive. These markets represent another economy: the economy of producing, selling, and distributing our daily bread. And this economy isn’t doing well for us at all! (Energy costs rose by 10.9 percent last month, the price of fuel oil spiked by 30.7 percent, the cost of gasoline by 21.2 percent and energy commodities by 21.3 percent, according to the BLS data. )
The March jobs report dropped on Good Friday. The pundits applauded the 4.3% unemployment (down from 4.4% in February) and the 178,000 jobs created. We are told that even with rising prices, everything is great! Fantastic! Better than it’s ever been! So why are millions of us struggling to put food on the table, put gas in our vehicles, and pay the electric bill? Even with the increase in wages (wages have increased 42.4% since the 2008 recession), our paychecks can’t keep up. We must be doing something wrong if the pundits are right. Are we crazy?
Well, we are not crazy. Let’s peel back some layers of this report and get to the heart of the matter. First, 76,000 of those 178,000 jobs were in healthcare, and 31,000 of those were healthcare workers that had been on strike and returned to work. That makes only 45,000 jobs created in healthcare. There were 21,000 jobs added in transportation, 26,000 in construction, 14,000 in the social sector, and a negative 18,000 in government employment. The government is the largest employer. Because of Musk and DOGE, the government lost 355,000 jobs in 17 months, down 11.8%. There were 64,000 fewer jobs in March.
So how did the unemployment rate drop by 1% in March? This is the little-known secret the government doesn’t share openly. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) there were from 468,000 to 510,000 discouraged workers in the US who are not in the labor force, want a job, and are available to work but stopped searching because they believe no jobs are available. These workers are not included in the official unemployment rate. There are currently 6 million people that are not counted in the labor force who say they want a job.
So now we have millions of workers who want to work but can’t find a job, and we have employers who apparently are not hiring workers. If the economy, according to the experts, is doing so well (Just look at the DOW!), why aren’t jobs increasing? Why is our government cutting all the programs that aid us workers and our families so we can work? After all, isn’t it the workers who keep an economy going? Who makes the stuff we need to live and who buys that stuff? Historically, in an expanding economy, it has been us workers who have kept the system going. Without us there were no goods and services produced for the owners to sell back to us, which grew their profits! So why are there no jobs?
Well, who are the producers in our booming economy today?
Today workers are being replaced by automation in increasing numbers. Motivated by the oil shock which raises the risk of global recession and depression, 66% of CEOs plan to freeze or cut hiring through 2026. These business leaders are betting on AI to do the job. But wait! If you think you’ll get a job in AI, there were 80,000 layoffs in high tech in the first quarter of 2026, and nearly 50% of those were due to AI replacing workers! AI led all reasons for job cuts in March.
So, if AI is the basis for the new economy, but there will not be an expansion in employment, what is to be done? If everything we need to survive is produced by robots who don’t eat or buy what’s produced, and our political class is destroying our means of survival by transferring all the wealth up to the owning class, then we need to organize like never before to get what we need to survive and thrive. We can’t continue to allow Wall Street to dominate the economy. We must not allow the pundits to divide us. It is not immigrants stealing our jobs. None of us own the jobs. We don’t own the economy.
We need a different economy; one that works for us. It’s plain to see that the current owners will discard us like yesterday’s bad news if we no longer serve their interests. With AI, most of us are no longer necessary in its society. History is giving us a choice: organize to get what we need or die!
Cathy Talbott is a former telephone operator, a job lost to automation. She was a homeless mother of two and fights for welfare rights. A former co-host of a weekly community radio program out of Carbondale, IL, “Occupy the Airwaves,” Cathy is the Environmental Desk for the People’s Tribune.
