The Economy Is Hiring, But Leverage Is Dying

Prima facie, this is not a recessionary labor market.

The United States added 172,000 jobs in May. The unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. The recent hiring pace still looks healthy: the three-month average is roughly 188,000 jobs per month. [1]

That sounds solid.

Until you look at the details.

Professional and business services added only 6,000 jobs. Information lost 2,000. Financial activities lost 22,000. So if we use those three categories as a rough proxy for the white-collar coordination layer, that layer lost about 18,000 jobs while the economy gained 172,000 overall. [1]

The economy barely blinked.

That is the part worth sitting with.

White-collar leverage took the hit, and the headline walked away clean.

It is like Spot died, everyone shrugged, the birds kept singing, BLS recorded a gain, and the pundits celebrated.

The death was tragic. The indifference was the certificate.

Here is why.

The White-Collar Layer Is Not Where the Strength Is

The jobs were not mainly created in the high-leverage white-collar layer.

Professional and business services added only 6,000 jobs. Information lost 2,000. Financial activities lost 22,000. [1]

That math is not complicated:

6,000 - 2,000 - 22,000 = -18,000.

Meanwhile, the visible job growth came from leisure and hospitality, which added 70,000 jobs; local government, which added 55,000; and health care, which added 35,000. [1]

Those jobs matter. They are real jobs. They support real people.

But they do not carry the same leverage.

A restaurant job, a care job, a government job, and a software job are not interchangeable units of human agency. The labor report treats them as payroll entries. Human life does not.

This is the trap in the headline.

The economy can add jobs while high-agency labor loses ground. It can look stable while the people who used to sit near the coordination layer are pushed outward, downward, or sideways.

The payroll number survives.

The leverage does not.

What Leverage Actually Means

By leverage, I do not only mean money.

I mean the ability to shape your own life. To have your voice heard without fear of repercussions.

The ability to influence the work you do, to disagree with the status quo and still have your opinion heard, your ideas respected, and your individuality celebrated.

Leverage is the ability to move toward Maslow’s top need: self-actualization.

That is the part missing from the headline.

When health care, housing, retirement, safety, status, and basic stability are tied to employment, workers do not merely choose jobs. They are forced into bargains.

If high-leverage work disappears and lower-leverage work expands, the economy can still look employed while people feel trapped.

A household can still have income while losing escape routes. A professional can remain “employed” while being asked to hold more responsibilities, work longer hours, sit in traffic an extra two hours a day, and skip birthday parties, all for flat or failing compensation after accounting for inflation.

The jobs report does not show collapse.

It shows a bargain getting worse.

Stagnant Income Is Not a Smoking Gun, But It Is a Fair Proxy

This is where income matters.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent in May and 3.4 percent over the year. [1]

That sounds fine until you compare it with inflation. The latest CPI release showed prices up 3.8 percent year over year in April. [2]

For someone earning \(100,000, 3.4 percent wage growth means an extra \)3,400. But 3.8 percent inflation means it takes about $3,800 more just to hold the same purchasing power.

That is roughly a $400 annual shortfall.

That is before the extra labor done off the books to appease the status quo: longer hours, longer commutes, extra meetings, after-hours messages, office theater, emotional compliance, and the daily performance of being “aligned” while your actual leverage shrinks.

Not catastrophic.

Just undignified.

The insulting part is that executive pay keeps moving the other way. AP’s 2026 CEO pay survey found typical CEO compensation rose nearly 6 percent to about \(17.7 million. At the top end, Equilar’s early look at the 100 highest-paid CEOs found median compensation rose 23.2 percent to \)29.4 million. [4][5]

So workers get to sleep in flooded cabins.

Executives get the VIP staterooms.

Tech Layoffs Barely Moved the Room

Tech layoffs hit hard in May.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that U.S.-based employers announced 97,006 job cuts in May, the highest May total since 2020. Technology companies announced 38,242 cuts, the sector’s highest monthly total since August 2024. [3]

AI was cited for 38,579 announced cuts in May, accounting for 40 percent of all announced cuts that month. [3]

And the economy barely blinked.

That is the part tech workers should not ignore.

For years, technology professionals were treated as central characters in the economy. High pay. High leverage. Remote work. Portable skills. Strategic importance. The ability to influence systems from a keyboard.

This does not mean technology work is useless. It means capital has found ways to route around the labor class that used to perform it. At least for now.

The Industrial Revival Contradiction

Now we get to immigration.

The industrial revival thesis has a contradiction at its center.

You cannot rebuild an industrial base with tariffs while restricting the labor supply needed to staff it.

Tariffs are defensive. They protect the domestic field. But immigration is part of the offensive capacity. Without workers, builders, technicians, operators, engineers, drivers, nurses, welders, electricians, and factory labor, you do not get an industrial revival.

And defense without offense is a very effective way to manage contraction.

White-Collar Labor Will Not Become a Reserve Army Overnight, If Ever

White-collar labor is not going to become a reserve army of factory workers.

These workers enjoyed leverage for decades. They had remote work, high wages, portable skills, creative status, and a sense that their labor sat near the decision layer.

They are not eager to become private soldiers in the industrial trenches.

So if the country wants more factory labor, it has two choices.

Find people for whom factory work is an upgrade.

Or upgrade factory work until it matches the dignity, safety, prestige, and leverage people now expect.

That means better conditions, better pay, better mobility, better training, more ownership, more safety, and more real advancement.

I am not looking down on trades workers. I deeply respect their work, but I am more than a little apprehensive about making it a calling. I have ground stainless steel, laid down fiberglass, crimped wires, lifted Jeeps, swapped shock tubes, and rebedded hardware. Doing it occasionally is an experiment and a hobby. Doing it repeatedly under time pressure is like subjecting your luck to the harmonic decay goblins.

The Coordination Layer Has Less to Coordinate

There is another problem.

Business professionals and white-collar workers are not merely “office workers.” They are the coordination layer.

They manage complexity. They connect systems. They translate between labor, software, logistics, customers, capital, regulation, and institutions.

But without broad-based labor growth, the coordination layer becomes less useful.

A manager without teams is overhead.

A software platform without labor expansion is an answer in search of a question.

This is why immigration restriction matters even to white-collar labor. If the physical economy does not expand, if factories do not staff, if care systems do not scale, if construction cannot hire, if logistics cannot move, then the coordination layer has fewer real-world systems to coordinate.

The Deadlock

Absent a better bargain, we get deadlock.

Labor is waiting for capital to blink.

Capital is waiting for labor to blink.

Policy is yelling “manufacturing renaissance” while restricting the labor flows that could make one plausible.

Capital wants reshoring without paying enough to make industrial labor attractive.

Labor wants autonomy without the old white-collar demand engine.

Government wants domestic production without admitting that production requires people.

So the system freezes.

Not because nothing is happening. Jobs are being created. Payrolls are growing. The three-month average looks healthy.

The freeze is in leverage.

Workers are moving, but not necessarily upward. Capital is investing, but cautiously. White-collar labor is losing bargaining power. Physical labor is needed, but not yet upgraded enough to absorb the people being pushed out of the coordination layer.

That is not a clean recession.

It is a structural standoff.

The Real Meaning of the Jobs Report

This is where the latest job report becomes darker than the headline suggests.

It shows a labor market where employment exists, but leverage is shifting downward.

Workers are being pushed toward worse bargains.

White-collar labor is losing pricing power.

Tech layoffs barely move the macro needle.

Real income is not giving people enough room.

Immigration policy is restricting the very labor capacity needed for an industrial revival.

And the economy is learning that it can keep functioning while narrowing the range of human agency.

That is the contrarian read.

The economy is not failing in the obvious way.

It is functioning while reducing the number of people who can shape their own lives.

Why This Points Back to Independence

That does not mean everyone should panic. But everyone should be plotting a way to reclaim agency.

If you depended on employment for safety, housing, health care, status, mobility, and creative permission, your leverage was always more fragile than it looked.

The job market is gaslighting you while sanding down your individuality, then calling it efficiency.

That is why I keep returning to boats, energy, locomotion, and habitat.

A boat is not for everyone, but the deeper question applies: how would you use your creativity and intelligence to cheat the system and steal back ownership of your time and agency?

References

[1] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation — May 2026,” released June 5, 2026. Key figures used: +172,000 nonfarm payrolls; 4.3 percent unemployment; revised March payroll gain of +214,000; revised April payroll gain of +179,000; three-month average calculated from March, April, and May at about +188,000; professional and business services +6,000; information -2,000; financial activities -22,000; leisure and hospitality +70,000; local government +55,000; health care +35,000; average hourly earnings +0.3 percent monthly and +3.4 percent yearly. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm

[2] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index — April 2026,” released May 12, 2026. Key figure used: CPI-U +3.8 percent over the 12 months ending April 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

[3] Challenger, Gray & Christmas, “May Job Cuts Rise 16% from April; Highest May Total Since 2020,” released June 4, 2026. Key figures used: 97,006 announced May job cuts; technology sector 38,242 cuts; AI cited in 38,579 cuts, or 40 percent of all May cuts. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-may-job-cuts-rise-16-from-april-highest-may-total-since-2020/

[4] AP News, “Workers need to labor for 200 years to make what their CEO made in one, AP survey finds,” published May 2026. Key figure used: typical CEO compensation rose nearly 6 percent to $17.7 million. https://apnews.com/article/ceo-compensation-stock-awards-workers-pay-ratio-67449e8a07011e5390d704c665533f94

[5] Equilar, “Equilar 100: An Early Look at the Highest-Paid CEOs in 2025,” published April 23, 2026. Key figure used: median compensation for Equilar 100 CEOs reached $29.4 million in 2025, up 23.2 percent year over year. https://www.equilar.com/reports/126-highest-paid-ceos-2026-equilar-100.html