The Daily Signal - Full-Time Work, Real Pay Raises: How Trump Quietly Rebuilt the Job Market | E.J. Antoni, Ph.D.

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

“America’s Job Market Has  Entered the Slow Lane”—that was a recent Wall Street Journal headline. Most of the mainstream media echoes this interpretation, but the reality is much better than the headlines suggest. In fact, it’s as if the reporters who wrote those headlines didn’t read beyond the headline of the jobs report. Here’s what the Dec. 2025 jobs report actually showed:  ✅People working multiple part-time jobs exchanged them for single full-time jobs in December.  ✅During nearly the entire final year of the Biden admin, annual native-born employment was in the red. In 2025, native-born employment beat foreign-born employment by over 1.6 million. ✅The federal workforce is the smallest it’s been since 2014. “So, despite all the naysayers, Trump’s first year back at the helm saw a labor market undergo badly needed structural changes that are making Americans better off… If we keep up with tax reform, regulatory reform, and energy reform, economic growth will turn into a rocket sled on rails.” For more videos like this, subscribe to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel and enable notifications to be alerted the second a new video drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1 ⁠  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite all the naysayers, Trump's first year back at the helm saw a labor market undergo badly needed structural changes that are making Americans better off. The damage left by the Biden administration is not all gone, but we're headed in the right direction. And as each week goes by, more and more economic indicators are improving and more and more dials are lining up. 5% economic growth, which we were told was no longer possible, is looking more likely. This economy, including the labor market, is set to take off this year. If we keep up with tax reform, regulatory reform, and energy reform, economic growth will turn into a rocket sled on rails. Hello, I'm E.J. Antony for the Daily Signal.

America's job market has entered the slow lane. That was a recent Wall Street Journal headline. Most of the mainstream media echoes this interpretation, but the reality is much better than the headlines suggest. In fact, it's as if the reporters who wrote those headlines didn't read beyond the headline of the jobs report. Indeed, the latest employment data is robust with jobs going to Americans in the private sector and wages rising faster than prices. There's a lot to celebrate in the Labor Department's monthly jobs report for December, from who is getting jobs to the kinds

of jobs being created, as well as how much people are getting paid. For example, Native-born employment rose more than 2 million in 2025, while the number of foreign-born workers with jobs increased less than 400,000. This was the best December ever in terms of the number of Native-born Americans with jobs. It's especially important that we're seeing this positive change from where we were trending previously. During nearly the entire final year of the Biden administration, the annual change in native-born employment was negative, meaning Americans were losing jobs. All the supposed net job growth during that time was going to foreign-born workers, a category which even the Biden Labor Department had to admit contained an unknown number of illegal aliens. There are no questions on any of these surveys, either for businesses or households, that ask anything about legal status, collect and compare social security numbers, etc.

So it's no exaggeration to say that instead of being a kind of temp agency for foreign workers, President Donald Trump is returning the American labor market to the American people. In terms of the number of jobs added in December, the monthly survey of businesses showed an increase of just 50,000, but the survey of households showed the number of people employed jumped by 232,000. That's more than four times the increase. in payrolls. There's an explanation for this difference if we dig further into the report and it indicates a very positive development for the labor market. Multiple job holders plunged last

month by 444,000. That's the second largest drop since the government imposed COVID lockdowns. Simultaneously in December, the number of part-time jobs declined by 740,000 while full-time employment shot up by 890,000. A holistic view of these various labor market data paints a very positive picture. People were exchanging multiple part-time gigs for a single full-time job in December. It may not show up in certain aggregate figures, but individuals were improving. Further evidence of that was the so-called U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged and under-employed workers and fell a significant three-tenths of a percentage point. More people were able to get the kinds of jobs they wanted, like good-paying full-time work with benefits. Let's say someone has a

part-time job during the day and then drives for Uber in the evening and then waits tables on the weekend. For those playing along at home, that's three jobs, but the person really wants just one full-time job. If he or she quits all three of those part-time jobs and replaces them with a single full-time one, that's a net reduction of two payrolls. So it reduces the headline jobs number, even though the person is better off. This is very likely the exact dynamic that was at play last month. Hence, the number of people employed rose four times faster than the number of jobs. It's the opposite of what happened in many months,

during the Biden years. When inflation spawned a cost of living crisis, many Americans had to take a second or even a third job to make ends meet. That increased the headline jobs figure, all while folks' finances deteriorated. Today, we're mercifully moving in the opposite direction. There's more good news in terms of where jobs are being created.

All the net job growth in 2025 came from the productive private sector, while government jobs declined, due entirely federal layoffs. It's a positive development, but it drags down the headline jobs number. The job cuts to the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., resulted in a net decrease of 277,000 payrolls from January of 2025 when Mr. Trump took office through December. This is the smallest the federal workforce has been since 2014, which is great for America. People are moving out of the unproductive public sector and into the productive. private sector, the opposite of the Biden years. It means more people producing more goods and

services that we all want, as opposed to more people just making trouble in the swamp. In terms of the manufacturing sector, which many in the media are suddenly clutching their pearls over, we saw slow but steady job losses in 2025, which was just a continuation of a trend that began at the beginning of 2023 and is effectively three years old. Far from causing, a manufacturing catastrophe, the Trump administration's tariff policy didn't really move the needle. The trend is simply continued. After including all applicable labor department revisions to the data, the trend is neither accelerated nor decelerated, although output has arguably improved. The short-run effects of the tariffs haven't crushed manufacturing, like the so-called experts said they would,

as the tariff strategy is further refined and as the investment incentives of the Big Beautiful Bill kick in this year, the manufacturing outlook is at least improving, and we will hopefully halt the three-year decline that started under Biden and his anti-energy DEI-ESG agenda. Lastly, there's good news on the wage front where average weekly earnings accelerated from a 3.6% annual increase to 3.8%, which also beat inflation for 2025. That's important because it means not only are people's paychecks getting bigger, but that those paychecks can buy more. Inflation adjusted, also called real, weekly paychecks,

are up about 1.5% under Mr. Trump's second term after they fell 4% under Joe Biden. See, it doesn't just matter that paychecks are larger. They have to buy more, too. Otherwise, your extra pay is effectively worthless. So despite all the naysayers, Trump's first year back at the helm, saw a labor market undergo badly needed structural changes,

that are making Americans better off. The damage left by the Biden administration is not all gone, but we're headed in the right direction. And as each week goes by, more and more economic indicators are improving, and more and more dials are lining up. 5% economic growth, which we were told was no longer possible, is looking more likely.

This economy, including the labor market, is set to take off this year. If we keep up with tax reform, regulatory reform, and energy reform, economic growth will turn into a rocket sled on rails. I'm E.J. Anthony for The Daily Signal.