In case you missed it, the April jobs report came in last week. The headline that likely got buried under the thousand other headlines coming into your newsfeed? Even amidst all that April tariff uncertainty, the labor market held up pretty well. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%, payroll grew by about 177,000 jobs. (Caveat here that the impact of those tariffs won’t show up in labor market data for at least a couple of months.)
The biggest hiring sector in April was health care, which added about 51,000 jobs. But the uncertainty lurking in other corners of the economy could be coming for that sector next.
Let’s say you work in a part of the economy that’s particularly volatile right now, like the construction industry, or agriculture, or the federal government, or a nonprofit that relies on federal funding, or retail … well, you get the picture.
Economist Doug Staiger at Dartmouth College said if you’re looking for a job that’s a little more stable, “typically during an economic downturn health care employment is the great safe haven.”
But he said this time around, it’s not clear that will be true.
No matter how the economy is doing, people get sick and need medical care, especially as the U.S. population ages. But right now, Congress is mulling hundred billion dollar cuts to Medicaid — the federal health insurance program for low-income Americans.
“People I've talked to, who are, you know, working as administrators in hospitals, are certainly very concerned and worried about employment reductions,” Staiger said.
During previous periods of economic turmoil, it’s mostly lower skilled workers in retail and warehousing that move into lower skilled health jobs, like home health aides or hospital cleaning staff.
Economist Bianca Frogner at the University of Washington School of Medicine said the future strength of health care hiring may depend on the weakness of other sectors.
“Will tariffs have more of an impact on retail jobs than Medicaid cuts will have on health care jobs?” she said.
Frogner said those low-skill health care jobs pay just above minimum wage, but they’re needed. There’s evidence that when the economy starts sliding, so does people’s health.
