The place in 2024 there have been new jobs and potential areas of progress in a second Trump time period
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The labor market could face a dislocation as President-elect Donald Trump takes office for a second time later this month.
Over the past two years, healthcare dominated all other industries in terms of growth, helped in part by Covid-related spending. The health and human services sector added 902,000 jobs in 2024, nearly as many as the 966,000 jobs it added in 2023, according to Friday's employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A distant second was the government sector, which created around 440,000 jobs in 2024, up from 709,000 in 2023.
Some of the growth in health care jobs is also related to the increasing population and increasing number of retirees, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Health care and social security have been very popular for years,” Gould said in an interview with CNBC on Friday. “Part of it is due to population aging, part of it is just population growth.”
Impending change
But that could change in a second Trump administration, especially if there are mass deportations and renewed debate over foreign work visas. According to the Migration Policy Institute, immigrants made up nearly 18% of the healthcare workforce in 2021.
“There is already such a high demand there, and if mass deportations occur, that will certainly come at the expense of the services that can be provided in those sectors,” Gould said. “Then there could be shortages that could lead to more inflation because employers would try to outdo each other to get fewer workers, and that could cause problems in the macroeconomics.”
The government sector has been the second fastest growing sector in the last two years. Much of that growth has occurred at the state level, Gould said. The number of employees in state government grew faster than at the local level last year, while the number of employees in the federal government grew at about the same rate as at the state level.
But like health care, the government sector could see workforce cuts under President-elect Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, a strictly advisory body led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that aims to cut government spending.
“If you eliminate these types of policies at the federal level, you're going to lose a lot of highly productive workers, and that could have a detrimental effect on the services they provide and, of course, on the overall economy,” Gould said. “Unemployment can go up… So much can happen when you harm the essential federal workforce, and when there are fewer resources available at the same local level, that can be problematic as well.”
Manufacturing growth – perhaps
Conversely, a Trump administration could be positive for sectors such as manufacturing and mining and timber, the two groups that saw the lowest job creation in 2024. Trump's proposed tariffs could spur growth in these industries, but Gould said it's impossible to predict by how much.
Amid concerns about stubborn inflation in the new year, Gould said the focus on the labor economy going forward should be on the share of the corporate sector's income that goes to workers versus profits, which she said are still “very , very low”.
“When workers have money in their pockets and spend it on goods and services, that drives the production of goods and the provision of services,” she said. “Even though productivity has increased and inflation has fallen, there is simply much more room for wage increases without putting pressure on inflation.”
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