Marketplace - An underwhelming June jobs report

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

The Labor Department’s June jobs report came in with just 57,000 new jobs added. Economists expected double that, and while the unemployment rate ticked down, we consider why job growth may be middling. Also in this episode, we look at stagnant wage growth, a start-up that’s looking to de-extinct the woolly mammoth, the “lump of labor” fallacy, Saudi Aramco’s World Cup sponsorship, and a social worker who leads tours to supplement retirement.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

On all of it with me, Alison Stewart, we'll talk about art, music, theater, literature, history, food. Well, all of it. Hear in-depth, insightful interviews with authors like Zadie Smith, musicians like Steve Earle, actors like Kate Winslet and beyond. You never know who you'll hear next on all of it. But it's always worth listening. That's all of it, available wherever you get your podcasts. You know, it was fine. Me, so-so.

I mean, you pick your own word to describe today's jobs report. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Thursday, today the 2nd of July. Good as always, to have you along, everybody. Here's another one for your consideration. Today's June jobs report was Fair to Midland. There was a decidedly underwhelming number of new jobs added to this economy last

month, just 57,000, basically half of the best guesses, and April and May were revised down as well. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, did scoot down to 10%, 4.2%, the lowest in a year. What does it all mean? Marketplace of Mitchell Hartman gets us going. There's a fair amount you can spin as upbeat in the June report, says Sel Guacieri at BMO Capital Markets. We're not seeing widespread layoffs. That's a good thing, and the unemployment rate has ticked down. Though it's mostly for the wrong reason, says Nicole Bischot at ZipRecruiter.

Unemployment dropping back to 4.2% can seem good, but it fell because there are fewer people in the labor market as folks are exiting entirely. 720,000 people just stopped working or looking for work in June. As for job creation, says Bichaud. Pretty disappointing. Momentum earlier this spring did not hold in June. We saw soft job growth, the labor market still in a very fragile state. Still, Sal Guacieri says 57,000 jobs a month is more than enough to absorb new entrance to the labor force. With recent reductions in immigration, the so-called break-even point.

It's somewhere in the neighborhood of zero to about 50,000 per month. If payrolls are growing in that range, then on average, the unemployment rate should remain fairly stable. Drill down, though, and the unemployment picture looks more worrisome. Black and Hispanic youth unemployment, that's 16 to 19-year-olds, has been rising over the past year. Which could be a warning sign, says Angela Hanks, at the Century Foundation. In the next jobs report, what I would be paying attention to is, are we seeing similar increases in black and Hispanic unemployment overall, increases for workers who have less than a college education? Also, the percentage of Americans who who've been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer is up sharply from a year ago.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Wall Street today, the Dow was up. The NASDAQ was down. Everybody's taken tomorrow off. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Fact is you've got to pick and choose when you're covering the monthly jobs report because there is just so much in there. The choice we're going to make is wages today.

Average hourly earnings in June were up three and a half percent from the same time a year ago. That is up just a tick from May. But the longer-term trend is decidedly more mediocre. Last summer, wages were growing at close to 4% annually. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has that one. Right now, the labor market doesn't have a lot of oomph. Hiring is kind of meh, so people aren't really changing jobs, which is key to getting paid more. And you don't get bargaining power for wages from a job you have.

You get it from the job that you could take. Corey Cantanga is an economist with LinkedIn. It's kind of hard to go to your current boss and say, hey, pay me more. It's a lot easier if you can tell them, hey, these other guys are going to pay me more. But right now, those offers aren't so plentiful and workers are staying put. So we're not going to be seeing wage growth grow up until we start to see more workers quitting their jobs and finding new ones. Another potential factor, health care premiums are going up. Economist Guy Berger with the Burning Glass Institute says that eats into employers' pool of cash.

They have to fork over more money for that. And to the degree that happens, there's less money left over for raises or giving people bonuses. And if wages aren't keeping up with prices, workers simply can't buy as much. So now you're getting into the area of let's make choices. Belinda Romance, a professor of economics at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. How do we eat? What do we eat? Do I buy my medicines? What am I going to change? But like good Americans, we also want to have funds. So we'll probably go spend and put it all on credit. But if we do spend less, LinkedIn's Corey Cantanga points out, there are ripple effects for the whole economy.

If spending slows down, that slows down overall growth, which again shrinks the opportunities for workers. Cantanga says if you want to figure out if wage growth is going to pick up, keep an eye on how many people are quitting their jobs. Some of them are probably leaving for one that pays more. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace. With a nod to the temperatures in the eastern half of this country, and the caveat that any single heat wave, no matter how hot, cannot be directly correlated to climate change, the fact is the planet is getting hotter. And it's not just humans that are suffering.

Scientists say rising temperatures are accelerating a sixth mass extinction. The Texas Space Company, colossal biosciences, says its technology can help prevent some of those losses and even bring back some long-extinct species? From our climate podcast, How We Survive. Marketplace's Amy Scott reports. Inside a small glass cage, two mice are running around. Pretty much your typical mouse habitat. But these are not typical mice.

They're kind of poofed up looking with shaggy golden hair. Yeah, these are our woolly mice. Do they have names? Chipendale. That's Ben Lamb. CEO of colossal biosciences. The company claims that using tiny bits of woolly mammoth DNA, preserved over thousands of years, they can use gene editing to bring the giant creature back.

But they have to start small. We identified core genes in the mammoth genome that relate to hair thickness, color, density, how it grows, and whatnot. And we applied all of those into the mouse equivalent of them. What they learn from creating shaggy or mice could help bring back the mammoth. Lamb comes from the startup world. He'd founded or co-founded a bunch of other tech companies before starting Colossal in 2021. Today, he's wearing a shirt that looks like a concert tea, but instead of a band, it has a picture of a dire wolf,

the first creature that Colossal claims to have successfully de-extincted. It actually says, original tour date 8,500 BC, Encore Performance 2025. The resurrected wolves live on an undisclosed ecological preserve. At the company's glossy new headquarters in Dallas, doors to state-of-the-art labs branch off a long hallway, each one with scientists working on a different piece of the de-extinction puzzle. Other target species include the dodo and moa, extinct birds, and the Tasmanian tiger.

Michael Abrams leads the mammoth project. Our first step is to sequence the woolly mammoth genome, and we've got multiple samples. You can see here, this is a woolly mammoth molar. It's about the size of a brick. They scrape off a little piece that contains ancient DNA. Then they sequence it, figuring out as much as they can about which specific mammoth genes

code for important physical traits. Eventually, they plan to edit genes in an Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative, creating a modern-day mammoth, or at least an Asian elephant that looks like one. The reality is that only mammoths get to decide what mammoths are, right? And they're not here to tell us anymore. Jacqueline Gill is a paleo-ecologist at the University of Maine. She studies ice age ecosystems, including mammoths. Gill says she's deeply skeptical of breeding a genetically modified elephant and calling it a mammoth.

There's this whole constellation of unanswered questions about viability. Can we actually make a mammothy elephant that's mammothy enough? Impact. Will it do the things we think? And then ethics. Is this an okay thing to do? Plenty of investors seem to think so. Colossal has been valued at more than $10 billion with buzzy backers, including Peter Jackson, Tom Brue. Brady and in Qutel, the investing arm of the CIA. Colossal CEO Ben Lamb says that investment could also spur advances in human and animal health care and also protect endangered species.

Look, I think it's unethical not to do what we're doing. I don't think that human-caused climate events are going to slow down. And so I do think it's important that we have mitigation strategies against that, which includes de-extinction tools. The company is also working with Dubai's Museum of the Future to create a biovalt for endangered species, a place to store genetic material so that no animal ever has to go the way of the dodo. I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace.

Amy and the team did a whole season on some what could possibly go wrong climate interventions. Subscribe now to How We Survive on your favorite podcast. podcast. Coming up. I think I've probably hosted 750 people. That is a very big dinner party, huh? First though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up 594 points. One and a 10th percent finished at 52,900. That is a world record. The NASDAQ down 207 points, about 8 tenths percent, 25, 382. SP 500, we'll call that flat 74 and 882. SEP 500, we'll call that flat 74 and 8.000. For the short week, the Dow gained 1.9% The NASDAQ also picked up 1 and 9 tenths percent.

S&P 500 improved itself one and seven-tenths of one percent. If you're hosting a 4th of July barbecue with burgers and beer, it's going to be a little bit more expensive this time around. Average price for a pound of lean ground beef had a record of $8.62 in May. That's up more than 12% from last year. So says the BLS. This has made a cost of a 10-person barbecue, $161. That's the Wells Fargo Agra Food.

Institute coming up there. You're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is presented by Tomorrow's Cure. If our health care coverage leaves you wanting to learn more about the innovations shaping medicine, tomorrow's cure is for you. It's the chart-topping 2025 Amby Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic. Back for a brand new season with new host award-winning journalist Lindsay Sievert, Tomorrow's Cure explores the innovations changing the health care landscape. Featuring conversations with leading physicians, researchers, and medical experts, The new season examines everything from AI-powered diagnostics and cutting-edge cancer therapies to surgical technologies improving patient care today.

Not sure where to start? Listen to the season premiere featuring MD Anderson Radiation Physicist Dr. Page Taylor and Mayo Clinic Radiation Oncologist Dr. Adam Holtzman. They discuss why carbon ion therapy is generating excitement in the medical community and what it could mean for the future of precision cancer treatment. So go ahead. Follow Tomorrow's Cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. On all of it with me, Alison Stewart, we'll talk about art, music, theater, literature, history, food.

Well, all of it. Hear in-depth, insightful interviews with authors like Zadie Smith, musicians like Steve Earl, actors like Kate Winslet and beyond. You never know who you'll hear next on all of it. but it's always worth listening. That's all of it, available wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl.

Imagine for me now, if you would, a game of musical chairs. You know, from back in elementary school where everybody scrambles when the music stops? Keep that in your mind while you listen to this. The lump of labor fallacy is simply the notion that there's a fixed amount of word to be done. Edouard Weimmy is an associate professor of economics at Clark University, and the lump of labor fallacy is about jobs. If you believe there's a fixed amount of work to be done in this entire economy, it is kind of like a big game of musical chairs.

One player equals one worker and one chair equals one job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics told us this morning that in June, there were 159 million jobs in this economy. If one person was to gain one job, then it must be at the expense of somebody else. So if one more worker is going to enter the labor market, someone else must lose a seat. Catalina Amuelo Dorantes is a professor of economics at the University of California, Merced. And here's where economic theory hits current economic reality. A Reuters-Ipsos poll not too long ago found that more than half of Americans are afraid artificial intelligence could put them or someone in their household out of work.

You're going to basically, you know, remove a chair. But here's where I tell you that history tells us that the economy is not, in fact, a game of musical chairs. Technology does not simply eliminate labor. It changes basically what workers do. And it can raise productivity, lower costs, and create new products, firms, and occupations in general. That's the fallacy part of the lump of labor fallacy. If you think about the new technologies of the past, mechanized agriculture, sewing machines and word processors.

Those technologies didn't lead to mass unemployment. They freed people up to work in other industries and create new businesses and new jobs. It's actually they bring more chairs. Some jobs will be lost, but more jobs overall are going to be created in terms of total employment. That's the lump of labor fallacy in action right there. But that thing he said about some jobs being lost, it's really important. Individually is going to hurt. But on a macro level, more jobs are going to be created.

All right, so let's bring you back to artificial intelligence. I study the sociotechnical implications of AI. Nigel Melville is an associate professor at the University of Michigan, and he says agentic AI, AI that acts autonomously, is unlike technologies of the past. It's already taken over some software engineering and customer service jobs. I call it the gap. So this is the difference between the people that are being laid off or be, let go because of AI, and then the new jobs that are created because of AI.

A new report from Challenger Gray and Christmas found that companies cited AI in more than 100,000 layoff announcements this year. And according to the Stanford AI index, around 90% of all organizations now use artificial intelligence for at least one business function. We don't know exactly will it be this huge gap in how fast will it be. But we do know that we're approaching level four or level five rapids. It hurts when a new technology takes your job. Yes, absolutely. But the lump of labor fallacy tells us that eventually the economy is going to adjust

and the total number of jobs. That 159 million is going to grow. So I would not say that history proves that AI will have no negative employment effects. It may be. but I would be skeptical of the claim that every automated task translates directly into a permanent love job. There will be more chairs. The big question is how and maybe even whether companies and organizations and the government are going to prepare workers to sit in those new chairs.

The World Cup is obviously about the soccer, but it is also a very big, very expensive business. and FIFA's got to cover those expenses somehow. Pricy tickets and even a $4 billion television rights contract aren't going to do it. So enter then corporate sponsors. If you've been watching even casually, you've seen some of the brands that are trying to capitalize on all the attention. Marketplace's Elizabeth Trowball has this story about one of them. More than 10,000 minutes of soccer will be broadcast during the World Cup this summer, including replayable highlights, like this one. But accompanying every World Cup moment like this is an elite tier of brands.

They pay tens of millions of dollars to be plastered on the perimeter of the field and behind media interviews. One of those sponsors is Saudi Aramco. Saudi Aramco is the world's biggest oil company. They're a Saudi state oil company. Frank Heising, with fossil-free football, has led a global movement to oppose Aramco's partnership with the World Cup. They want to pump up oil and sell oil for as long as they can. But they have a bad reputation because they're a fossil fuel company. And when you have a bad reputation, what's better to associate yourself with than the most popular event in the world?

Despite its oil dominance, Sadia Ramco has billed itself as the global energy partner of this World Cup and not the global oil partner. Tim Kockens with Northwestern says that's no accident. Oil is sort of a bit of a negative brand. I don't think a lot of people go out and say I love oil, but everybody appreciates energy. They're clearly trying to position themselves as part of the energy transition as sort of more than just an oil company. That's Christian Coates Ulrichson with Rice University. He says what Aramco and other brands do is often called sports washing. They try to change the way that people talk so you're not focusing on negative stuff.

You're focusing on sport, on positive things. Sport hasn't appealed like no other. But consumers don't buy crude oil. They buy gasoline from a gas station and don't really care where those molecules come from. So I ask Tim Calkins, what is Saudi Aramco's play here? Aramco needs to have great relationships with regulators and big customers around the world. And having a positive perception of the Aramco brand is really important when it comes time to negotiate big deals. It makes the brand more attractive to work for.

partner with Invest in, Saudi Aramco declined my interview request. But Kalkin says that the Aramco partnership with FIFA is also about something else. The other piece, though, is that this is largely connected to the bigger story around the brand of Saudi Arabia. So Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a big rebranding project. I wouldn't be surprised if there was kind of a nudge from the kingdom as like, you know, this would be a good thing also for us. Ellen Wald wrote the book, Saudi Inc. Because Aramco is like one of the great crown jewels of Saudi Arabia. It's probably as a more favorable opinion than, you know,

than other things in Saudi Arabia or just Saudi Arabia. Is it sports washing? Absolutely. And people talking about sports in Saudi Arabia helps the country's rebrand. Christian Coates Ulrichson again. So they're trying to be able to use sport to change the way that people think about Saudi. So it's not Yemen. and it's not human rights, it's not Jamar Khashoggi, it's not 9-11.

Now you talk about Saudi in terms of football. Saudi Arabia will host the Men's World Cup for the first time in 2034. The country has been investing in soccer and other sports in recent years. Ben Cahill is with the University of Texas at Austin. I think in Saudi Arabia they see the sports industry as a growth area. If you think about all the investment in soccer, the number of famous soccer stars have come to play in Saudi Pro League, like Cristiano Ronaldo and Names.

He says this is part of Saudi Arabia's vision for the future, a vision that imagines the country as more than just an autocratic petro state. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. A lot of things that make retirement really attractive. More time to travel and spend time with your family, also not having to work, of course. But there has been a trend the past decade or so that we've talked about before on the program of older Americans staying in the workforce longer. The number of people over the age of 65 still working rose 33% between 2015 and 2024. But you know what? Continuing to work doesn't have to mean giving up completely on your vision for retirement.

And that brings us to the latest installment of our series, My Economy. This is Cheryl Alexander. I live in San Diego near the beach. I am a social worker therapist. and I have a small business where I lead a guided tour in Italy for small groups in the countryside. About 30 years ago, some friends of mine invited me to travel with them to Italy for a few weeks. And I fell in love with the beauty of the country and all that it has to offer. I began to plan my next trip on the way home flying back to San Diego.

I was just convinced I had to go back again. So I started a website and invited people to come, spend a week in the Italian countryside. And over the last 30-plus years, I think I've probably hosted 750 people, maybe close to 1,000. I did start this business for financial supplemental reasons. Once I retired from my day job, I realized that living in an expensive area of Southern California, I couldn't just live on retirement funds. So it's not anything that is going to make me rich because I don't want to do it full time. I just want to do it a couple of times a year. And that has supported my vision. for being able to travel and be somewhere where I really love being. There is a question I ask myself periodically. I'm 77. How long do I want to keep going to Italy and guiding people?

It's really hard for me to give a straight answer, like I'm going to retire or stop or whatever. I think as long as I'm healthy. and mobile, I can do this. And nobody's brought up the fact that I haven't stopped doing it. My friends usually will say, so, are you going to Italy in October again? Do you have a tour? Are you taking some people in May again?

You know, it's just gotten to be something that Cheryl does. Cheryl Alexander in San Diego, California, also twice a year, Italy. Italian excursion is the name of her company if you're looking for getaway, sign me up. Wherever you are and whatever you do, we want to hear your stories. Marketplace.org slash my economy is where you can share it. This final note on the way out today for those wondering how the Dow hit a record high, even as the jobs report was meh and fine and so-so.

Even though inflation is still high, which would ordinarily be met with an interest rate increase from the Federal Reserve, a meh, labor market means the central bank can more easily just wait and figure out what's going on before they raise rates. Listeners to this program will know that Wall Street hates interest rate increases, right? Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Mika Ellison, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry and Sophia Taranzeo. Will Story is the supervising senior producer. If you're working tomorrow, thank you.

If you're not, think about what the fourth means, would you? I'm Kyle Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is 8 p.m. I'm Amy Scott, host of How We Survive. a podcast about the messy business of climate solutions. To a lot of people, geoengineering might seem like a dangerous, outlandish way to play God. But some are embracing this sci-fi-inspired approach as a solution to the climate crisis. We're going to launch some balloons and send them into the stratosphere.

A constellation of sunshades would cast an even dimming of shade across the entire Earth. investing that much in building anything in space creates a whole space economy. Listen to how we survive on your favorite podcast app.