U.S. labor market hits ‘slack water’: Indeed Hiring Lab
TEXAS, UNITED STATES — The United States added 57,000 jobs in June and revised April and May down by a combined 74,000, as the Indeed Hiring Lab found a labor market in ‘slack water,’ moving neither into recovery nor into contraction.
An unmoving tide between recovery and recession
Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab, named the labor market’s current state precisely.
“Relatively few workers are being pulled into new jobs, and few are being pushed out of old ones,” Ullrich said.
The June reading of 57,000 jobs — per Bureau of Labor Statistics — is broadly comparable to 2015 hiring rates, but the U.S. labor force is 13 million workers larger today, making the same absolute number proportionally weaker.
Private education and health services led growth, adding 69,000 jobs, while leisure and hospitality reversed course to shed 61,000 — reflecting sharp sector divergences beneath the flat aggregate.
A labor market producing 2015-level job numbers with 13 million more potential workers is not stable — it is a market that has lost its growth trajectory.
A warning hidden in the stillness
“The stability of a stagnant labor market depends entirely on separations staying this scarce or, conversely, hires remaining subdued,” Ullrich warned, describing slack water as “a turning point, not a resting state.”
Unemployment ticked down to 4.2% in June, but the decline reflected falling labor force participation rather than new job creation — a distinction that masks the market’s underlying weakness.
Combined, April and May were revised down 74,000 jobs — a correction that erases the modest momentum many had read into those months’ original figures. Ger Doyle, North America Regional President at ManpowerGroup, noted that “the opportunities driving growth today increasingly require a different mix of skills than they did just a few years ago.”
Slack water is not a safe harbor — it is the brief stillness before the tide turns, and this labor market’s turn has more room to go down than up.
For BPO providers, a ‘slack water’ U.S. labor market is the operating environment they know best — when domestic hiring stalls, U.S. companies turn to variable offshore capacity to manage output without adding headcount.
Education, health services, and professional services — the sectors that gained the most — are exactly where Philippine offshore teams provide scalable delivery at lower cost. When the tide turns negative — as Ullrich warns is well within reach — cost pressure will accelerate the outsourcing decisions already sitting in pipeline at business process outsourcing (BPO) providers across the Philippines.
