Marketplace - There are more unemployed people than job openings right now

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

The latest JOLTS report is bleaker than expected. There were 6.5 million job openings across the U.S. economy in December, down nearly 400,000 from the previous month. This misaligned labor market is especially prominent in the services sector. In this episode, what's next for employment and which groups in particular are struggling to find work. Plus: The U.S. lags behind China in electrical capacity expansion, bankers show reluctance to lend to AI-impacted industries, and a photographer installs free-to-use phones across his city.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.

Feels like it's been a while, so I'm going to say it out loud again, just so as we all remember. Stocks go down to, gang, from American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Thursday. Today, this is the 5th of February. Good as always. To have you along, everybody.

The standard caveat applies here. Stock market, economy, not. But stock market vibes? Economy-ish. The major indices today, as you have perhaps seen or already heard, not good in a kind of substantive way, people are a bit wigged out over the big software companies and what AI might do to them. Google, as we mentioned yesterday, is going to spend $175 to $185 billion on AI this year. There is some Adjada out there about that.

And then there's the labor market, of which we have spoken often recently, and about which we have some new numbers today. The first number, that is, is 213,000. That's how many people filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week, a not small jump of 22,000 from the week earlier. The next number is $6.5 million. That is the number of job openings across this economy in December. that's from the latest job openings and labor turnover survey, the fewest openings since back in September of 2020. Marketplace's Daniel Arkhamen is on the labor market beat for us today. Here's one concern that Mark Hamrick, an economist at bank rate, has about those 6.5 million job openings. That's substantially below the total number of unemployed persons that were reported by the Labor Department in the most recent employment report. Hamrick says it's the reverse of a few years ago, when there were two job openings for every unemployed worker.

So we are seeing, I think, now a bit of a misalignment between the supply and demand, of and for labor. And some sectors seem to be misaligning faster than others, says Tuan Nguyen, an economist at RSM. There was more labor, demand for goods-producing sector and less for services sector. Less demand for professional and business services, for example, which had over a quarter million fewer job openings in December compared to the month before. Nguyen says the growth of artificial intelligence could be one explanation. If you look at the broader market, this might be one of the biggest issues that we are experiencing. The fear of AI eating into profit margins and market share of tech companies that are behind on AI adoption. Some of those companies might be racing to deploy AI rather than bringing on new workers.

Pavlina Chernova, a professor of economics at Bard College, says it's too early to tell how much AI is really to blame here, but the hiring slowdown is starting to take its toll on some groups. Labor market is very challenging place for young people, for young workers. Their unemployment rates are approaching double digits. Unemployment for black workers is rising too. So when you add all of this together, the conclusion is that the labor market is just not creating enough jobs. And she says the problem doesn't seem to be improving. The number of workers unemployed for half a year or longer has nearly doubled in the past three years.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. Wall Street today, as I said, traders did not much like what they were seeing. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The Marketplace acronym, oh, the day is so. Sloos, S-L-O-O-S, much as I would like to be able to claim it for ourselves, we cannot. It comes to us from the Federal Reserve, which once a quarter does a survey of loan officers across the country. Senior loan officers, to be precise, seeking their opinions on how things are going. Let's see if you can put two and two together here.

It is the senior loan officer's opinion survey, sluice. Anyway, the Fed wants to know what kind of loan demand they are seeing, what they're lending standards are, that kind of thing. The most recent version came out this week covering Q4 of last year. And this time around, the central bank asked some questions, trying to get a better understanding of how those loan officers are feeling about lending to companies that are exposed to artificial intelligence. Marketplace's Justin Ho made some calls to find out for himself. When you ask a lender how they decide whether to make a loan, they'll often bring up the five Cs of lending. Character, capacity to repay capital or financial.

resources, collateral and conditions. We're looking at how the loan will be used and external factors like interest rates and trends in the industry. That's Robert James II, CEO of Carver Financial Corporation, which owns banks in Alabama and Georgia. He says the most important CEO on that list is character, as in a borrower's credit history. But another big one is capacity, whether a borrower will be able to repay a loan, today and in the future. And that's where the presence of AI, the threat of AI, or perhaps the opportunity presented by AI, starts to impact a business model. Lenders are concerned about whether AI is going to disrupt the borrower's entire industry. David Schiff, with FTI Consulting, says a bank might think twice about lending

to a company that provides services that AI can provide. There's a threat where customers could substitute and or put pricing pressure on them. On the other hand, Schiff says AI could make some borrowers more attractive to lenders. A company that can use AI tools might be able to cut costs and pay off its debt more easily. Where there is a lot of underlying expense tied to easily repeatable, digitizable tasks, a lot of banks are looking at that as a cost-save opportunity. Schiff says it can be challenging to figure out whether AI poses an opportunity or a threat. And it's something that the banks are having to look at and make judgment calls on, and at the end of day they're making bets. In some cases, banks are betting that their clients won't be affected.

It's a non-factor for my customers. That's Brad Bolton, CEO of Community Spirit Bank in Red Bay, Alabama. He says his customers include contractors, timber harvesters, farmers, and truckers. I just don't see that my customer that's hauling dog food or hauling paper out of a paper mill, you know, that's a trucker that's, their lives are not going to be changed by AI. At least, he says, not within the next five or so years. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. Data from the Federal Communications Commission tells us that in the year 2000, there were more than 2 million pay phones distributed across this economy.

By 2016, we were down to 100,000, after which the FCC stopped even keeping count. But just because traditional pay phones have been disappearing doesn't mean the need for some kind of public telephone access has disappeared too. The good people at Pew Research tell us that 98% of Americans on a cell phone, which tracks, right? But it also means that 2% don't. Eric Kunsman is a photography professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is also the leader of the Good Phone Project. First, Kundsman, good to have you, Hanser. Thank you for having me.

Tell me about the Good Phone Project. What does it do? What do you guys do? So the Good Phone Project is we're upcycling pay phones that we've, of course, wired over the years. And we're providing free phone calls for people up to 20 minutes free, unless it's social services. We really looked at the Rochester demographic, and that's where we're providing those calls. Frontier Communications has ripped out all their pay phones nationwide, but especially here in Rochester. Who are your clientele? Who's using these phones?

Right now, where we primarily place them are we call them partners, because it's whether there's homeless shelter, avity centers. our county libraries have reached out because they were having so many people using their front desk phones. Oh, yeah. That, you know, we need to get people away from the front desk. It's not private. Sometimes it's a distraction. We're really partnering with just different groups because they pretty much provide the electric and the Internet because the phones are actually all voiceover IP.

And that's where we're converting them. And that's how we can make them free. Gotcha. This whole project, though, the infrastructure, such as it is, is not free, right? There's some carrying costs for you in the group. Yeah, we basically are a call. applying pay phones, and believe or not, the cost has gone up by about $120 over the past year. Really?

Like for old pay phones? Yeah. They went from $250 to about $370 because people are apparently installing them in their homes now. They're becoming a fad. So, but then we have a monthly fee that we're paying for the voiceover IP service. We have voicemail service that people can set up voicemail boxes. That way, if they're applying for a job or they give their extension to their loved one, they can retrieve that across the entire network also.

Right, right. So it's a social services thing. With all respect, I ask this question. You are a photographer. What do you know about running a social services agency? I don't. That's why we're a lot of really what the reason why this happened was, as you said, I'm a photographer.

I teach photography at RTT in printing. I own a business and we were in the neighborhood of the arts in Rochester, New York, previously. And when I relocated to the Hosanna neighborhood by our minor league, baseball stadium, a lot of people, there was a knee-jerk reaction. Like, why would you move there? It's scary there. It's a war zone. But that's where I got to know, you know, the families that live there. And it's not crime. If you look at the previous census data when I moved in 2017, it's really about poverty. So then I started photographing the pay phones. At first, just trying to figure out

why were people labeling this area. And then I was taught a lesson that people were still using the phones in 2018. Yeah. So that's where once I heard Frontier was going to rip them out nationwide. I was like, I teach an engineering school. There has to be a way we can do this. And I have team members. The five of us are kind of a hodgepodge group. And, you know, we're just trying to do good for the community at this time.

In an ideal world, your project gets taken over by a social services group that actually has infrastructure and staff and funding, right? That's the future, I imagine, that you're hoping for. That or even, whether it can be county or city government, because if I'm still doing this in five years, I believe we failed because the average phone is being used 400 times a month. And so with that in mind, we're hoping somebody will take it over. Right. Right now, we're completely grant-based or donations at this point. And we've had, since our last ribbon cutting, we've getting a lot of inquiries from the Buffalo, New York Public Club. libraries. People from all over the country say, how do we get this in our community? It's like,

we're trying to lay out, like, here's the all-a-card. This is what it costs to buy a phone. These are the people you need, and so forth. Well, here's hoping that they hear this program. Eric Kundsman is a photography professor in Rochester, New York, also, and more to the point, the founder and project lead at the Good Phone Project. Mr. Kundsman, thanks for your time, sir. I appreciate it. Thank you for having. Coming up. The poles and the wires in the system are old, and we haven't had to build new power in this country for a long time.

Well, that's not great. First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials gave up 592 points today, 1 and 2 tenth of 1%. 48,908. The NASDAQ down 363, 1 and 610%, 22,540. S&P 500 down 84 points, 1 and 2 tenths percent, 6798. Yes, of course, the wahas. Come on, man.

Tech stocks contributed to the drop today. Amazon closed down 4.4% just before an earnings report after the bell, which sent it down even more in after hours trading. Alphabet, parent, O'Goole, slipped about a half percent. Cell phone chipmaker Qualcomm down 8.5% on the day. Bond prices went up. The yield on the 10-year T-note thus fell down to 4.190% on the 10-year. You are listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Colin Risdahl. Dan Ackerman started us off today with Labor Market Day.

job openings and first-time claims for unemployment, specifically where the news was, as you remember, because it was like nine and a half, ten minutes ago. Me? Honestly. If you pull back just a bit, though, it doesn't get too terribly much better. We're not getting the January unemployment report till next Wednesday versus tomorrow. Thank you. Most recent government shutdown.

But what we know so far is not real encouraging. The private sector payroll data we got yesterday from ADP was underwhelming just 22,000 new jobs. in January. The unemployment rate does remain a bright spot, trending up, but still just 4.4% last we heard. As happens with data, though, the headline simply isn't the whole story. There have been, in fact, upward spikes in unemployment for specific groups. Black unemployment in particular is up nearly one and a half percentage points in the past year to seven and a half percent right now. Black women's unemployment is up by nearly two full percentage points. And as Marketplaces Mitchell Hartman reports,

That is going to have some lasting after effects. Cherniece Mundell is 48, a homeowner and mother of three adult children, two of them living with her in Maryland. A year and a half ago, she started a job as a member of the American Federation of Government employees at the Federal Office of Personnel Management, working on health insurance contracts. She was still a probationary federal worker in January 2025 right after the inauguration, when? We started getting emails. asking us if we wanted to take deferred resignation. I said I wasn't going to take it.

I was just going to, you know, ride it out. It was a short ride. In mid-February, her job was eliminated. She was told in a pre-recorded video. Without income, she struggled financially. She went on food stamps. And the job search? Oh, it was really hard.

I would apply for like four jobs every few days. I would get an email occasionally saying that I met the qualifications. They would put my application on file. Mundell's bout of unemployment makes her part of a trend, says Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute. Over the course of the last year, there was clear deterioration in the labor market for black workers. Historically, black unemployment runs about double the rate of white unemployment. But in the last year, as the economy has slowed, white unemployment, employment has barely budged, while black unemployment has soared by an additional 1.4 percentage

points. One development in particular has driven that increase, says Benga Agilori at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Sharp cuts to federal employment. This time last year, we had the Department of Governmental Efficiency or Doge basically taken a chainsaw to the federal workforce. Historically, the place black households have been able to find good jobs, well-paying jobs, with pension benefits. Back in 2024, black workers made up 18 and a half percent of federal workers versus about 13 percent of the U.S. workforce as a whole. So Agilori says black workers have lost jobs disproportionately in the doge cuts. And black women were overrepresented in some of the agencies that suffered the deepest cuts, like the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services.

Another big drag on black women's employment has come from the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, says EPA's Valerie Wilson. Corporations, the federal government, eliminating DEI positions and offices more likely to employ black women. Another group of workers worries economist William Rogers at the St. Louis Fed. Whenever the economy slows down, young African Americans, 18 to 24 years of age, No more than 10 years of experience, no more than a high school degree, their employment prospects start to wane. When the job market peaked in mid-20203 and demand for workers was highest, this group had an unemployment rate below 15%. Now it's nearly 22%. The rise in black unemployment will cause long-term economic damage, says Tulane University economist Gary Hoover.

If you're unemployed, then that's going to affect your income, investing and saving. ability. Hoover says more black families will have to dip into emergency savings. They'll miss out on pension and IRA contributions, leading to lower household wealth accumulation. After her layoff from the federal government being without a paycheck certainly dealt Maryland resident Cherniece Mundell, a financial blow. She was delayed getting on unemployment, and after eight months of mostly fruitless job searching, she finally landed a position doing insurance authorizations at a big regional hospital. The pay is a little slightly less than I was making with the federal government,

but it does pay my bills and I enjoy it. So it worked out. It worked out. She says she misses her job with the government, serving the public, but for now, she's just happy to be working again. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. You've heard perhaps that the most recent nuclear weapons agreement between Russia and the United States has lapsed.

Today is the last day, actually. It's the new START treaty by name, and Chatternow is of a new nuclear arms race. And look, nuclear weapons are nothing to turn a blind eye to, obviously. But nukes ain't the only race in town. China and the United States are in a race of their own, each trying to dominate in cutting-edge technologies, robotics and AI, quantum computing. Also, though, the energy to power all of those things. And given that you can't do any of them without being able to plug them in, as it were, the stakes of the energy race might well be the most important.

Marketplace's Sabree Benishore has more on that one. China's energy buildup is staggering. Jason Bordoff is director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia. They've built more power generation capacity in the last four years than the entire U.S. grid combined. In just the last year alone, China, added the equivalent of 40% of the electrical capacity of the entire United States. China is projected to double its wind capacity, probably triple its solar capacity, and 6x its battery capacity by 2030.

Leslie Abrams is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. One cluster of solar farms in Western China, the Tolitan Solar Park, covers 162 square miles of desert. That is seven times the size of Manhattan. One solar park. And China's lead is not just in renewables. They also are the top investors in other technologies, like large-scale nuclear. So they have almost 30 reactors currently under construction, which is about 50% of all global development. If energy is a race, the U.S. is losing it. Kyle Chan is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The U.S. struggles to build out new energy.

And it's not a problem that the U.S. has really dealt with before, given that there wasn't really that much growth and energy demand until now with AI. Whereas China has been adding energy for many years to power its manufacturing base, in the U.S., decades of demand stagnation and underinvestment have made it hard to adjust. Columbia's Jason Bordoff. We lost muscle memory. We've had to build new power generation. The poles and the wires in the system are old, and we haven't had to build new power in this country for a long time.

It's difficult to get permits. There are all sorts of bottlenecks. Areas where the U.S. was surging, like renewables, have run into roadblocks. The White House is trying to jumpstart nuclear power, but it's also trying to end offshore wind. Tariffs are making solar panels more expensive. High interest rates have dragged down financing. CSIS is Leslie Abraham's. Our renewable growth will be about half of what we had previously thought it was going to be.

And it's not just renewables. Natural gas prices are rising, albeit from very low levels. And there are major problems in the U.S. right now turning more gas into more power. There has been a shortage of the turbines that you need for those natural gas plants. Kelly Morgan is Research Director for Data Centers at S&P Global. She says it has gotten so bad that AI companies are literally, scouring the world for parts to build their own natural gas power plants. They're looking at airline engines. They're looking at train engines. They're looking at used engines.

AI companies in particular have a lot to lose or gain from the fate of the U.S. energy grid. Columbia's Jason Bordoff. The biggest risk that the U.S. might not win the race for leadership in AI is sufficient access to power at low cost. And here is where the energy race with China becomes. an everything race. Because energy is not just for AI. It is for cars. It is for humanoid robots and industrial automation. It is for AC on days that keep getting hotter, Brookings Kyle Chan. It's not just a matter of missing out on an energy opportunity, but potentially missing out on a broader technology opportunity. All that said, electrical grid operators in the U.S.

are trying. Drew Maloney, the CEO of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents electrical companies. We're investing more than a trillion dollars over the next five years in order to build that energy infrastructure and meet that growing demand. The big question is will all of that be enough? In New York, I'm Sabrina Benshore for Marketplace. This final note on the way at the day in which the operative phrase is disorderly decline. It's most often used in association with the dollar, as in the dollar going down for reasons everybody understands is fine-ish. but when nobody can figure out what's going on and it falls a lot quickly, that is a disorderly decline. The subject at hand today is not the dollar, but Bitcoin, which, while yes, still an

almost entirely speculative asset is nonetheless a sizable asset class. Well, what we have this week in the OG cryptocurrency is a classic disorderly decline. BTC against the dollar off as much as 14% today, 25% for the week. percent the past 30 days, $63,000 and change per Bitcoin at one point on this day. Our daily production team includes Olivia Burdette, Andy Corbyn, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, Michaela Sia, and Sophia Torenzio. Will Storri is the supervising senior producer. I'm Kai Rizzdall.

We will see tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. Ready to make the most of your money? Sign up to receive weekly tips from Marketplace designed to help you make. smarter financial decisions. Plus, you'll also be the first to know about exclusive Marketplace merchandise and local events. Text Marketplace to 80568 to sign up.