For the past two years, healthcare has dominated all other industries in terms of growth, helped in part by Covid-related spending. The health care and social assistance sectors will add 902,000 jobs in 2024, according to Friday’s job report From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they created about 966,000 jobs in 2023.
The public sector came a long way, creating about 440,000 jobs in 2024, down from 709,000 in 2023.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said part of the increase in health care jobs is tied to a growing population and an increasing number of retirees.
“Health care and Social Insurance have been growing gangbusters for years,” Gould told CNBC in an interview Friday. “Some of it is an aging population, some of it is just population growth.”
The coming change
But that could change in a second Trump administration, especially if it brings. Mass deportations And a new debate on foreign labor visas. Account of Immigrants About 18% of healthcare workers in 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“There is already so much demand and if we have mass deportations, it will definitely come at a cost. Services that can be provided. In those sectors,” Gould said. “Then you can have shortages that can lead to more inflation because you have employers trying to beat each other to try to get fewer workers, And it can cause. Problems in Macroeconomics.”
The public sector has been the second fastest growing sector in the last two years. Gould said most of the progress has been at the state level. The state-level government workforce grew at a faster rate than local ones last year, while the number of federal government employees grew at about the national rate.
But, like health care, the government sector could see workforce cuts under President-elect Trump’s new Department for Government Efficiency, a tough advisory body headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy aimed at cutting government spending. is
“If you get rid of this kind of policy at the federal level, you’re going to lose a lot of highly productive workers, and that could be detrimental to the services they provide and obviously the overall economy. For,” Gould said. “Unemployment can go up … if you lose that important federal workforce, and if there’s less funding at the same local level, there are a lot of things that can be problematic.”
Manufacturing development – maybe
Conversely, a Trump administration could be positive for sectors like manufacturing and mining and logging, the two groups that created the weakest jobs in 2024. Trump’s proposed tariffs could spur growth in those industries, but Gould said it’s impossible to predict how much.
With concerns about sticky inflation heading into the new year, Gould said the focus for the labor economy moving forward should be the share of corporate sector income that goes to workers versus profits, which he said There is still “very, very little”.
“When workers have money in their pockets and spend it on goods and services, it drives the production of goods and the supply of services,” he said. “Even though we’ve seen productivity growth and we’ve had inflation come down, there’s a lot of room for wages to rise without putting upward pressure on inflation.”