WSJ What’s News - Why More White-Collar Workers Are Unemployed for Longer Today

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

P.M. Edition for Jan. 6. Unemployed workers in certain white-collar sectors are finding it harder to get new jobs. We speak with Wall Street Journal reporter Jasmine Li about what this means for the labor market more broadly. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces that he plans to step down after nearly a decade in power. Paul Vieira, who covers Canada for the Wall Street Journal, discusses how we got here. Plus, Congress certifies Donald Trump’s election win. Alex Ossola hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With TD Direct Investing, new and existing clients could get 1% cash back. Great! That's 1% closer to being part of the 1%. Maybe, but definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says that he will step down, leaving the government weakened ahead of a possible trade war with the U.S. Exports to the U.S. are basically the lifeblood of the Canadian economy. So there is a risk of a bit of a power vacuum here in Canada with a seemingly lame duck prime minister in power that the Trump administration would have to deal with. And Congress certifies Donald Trump's election win.

Plus, it's taking longer for some unemployed workers to find new jobs in white collar industries. It's Monday, January 6th. I'm Alex Osceola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We start today in Washington. Congress smoothly certified President-elect Donald Trump's electoral victory. Shortly before 1 p.m., Vice President Kamala Harris,

serving as the President of the Senate, walked onto the House floor to preside over the certification of the election she lost. In response to the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6th, 2021, Congress passed legislation that makes it clear that the Vice President's role is merely to count the votes publicly,

and that he or she has no power to alter the results. Lawmakers then read out the results of each state's election one by one, affirming that they were accurate. No objections were raised. As Harris read out part of the result, she was interrupted by lawmakers cheering and applause. The votes for president of the United States are as follows.

Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes. Kamala D. Harris. Separately, Donald Trump launched an effort to block the sentencing of his hush money trial which was set for later this week. Lawyers for Trump argued that Justice Juan Marchand wrongly scheduled the sentencing before the president-elect's return to the White House and asked the judge to put all proceedings in the case on hold while Trump pursues appeals of recent rulings. The judge has said he doesn't intend to sentence Trump to a prison term, but rather an unconditional

discharge, a sentence with no punishment. In Canadian politics, Justin Trudeau has said he will resign as the Prime Minister of Canada after nine years in power. In an announcement today, Trudeau said that he will stay as the prime minister of Canada after nine years in power. In an announcement today, Trudeau said that he will stay on as prime minister until the party picks a new leader, a process that could take months. He also moved to suspend the current session

of the legislature to avoid facing a no-confidence vote in parliament. This country deserves a real choice in the next election. And it has become clear to me that if I'm having to fight internal battles I cannot be the best option in that election. The announcement comes a few weeks after Canada's finance minister resigned because she disagreed with Trudeau's spending proposals.

That caused members of Trudeau's party to urge him to step aside. Trudeau would exit as one of the most unpopular political figures in the country, leaving his party in a weakened position and his country facing an uncertain economic future. WSJ reporter Paul Viera joins us now from Ottawa to tell us more. Paul, how did we get here? What led to Trudeau's resignation? There's just been a series of events, a lot of them taking place after the pandemic. The prime Minister's popularity and his government's popularity started to wane. Once we saw inflation rise, interest rates go up aggressively to tame inflation. And a big bet on immigration that actually

pushed up housing prices, which disillusioned a lot of would-be homebuyers, especially younger Canadians. He's been suffering the same ailments that other Western leaders have, and he had become a somewhat polarizing figure in Canadian politics. This all began to take a toll, and finally party members increasingly called for Mr. Trudeau to step aside

and to let a new leader lead the Liberals to give them a fighting chance in an election that's due this year. You mentioned some of the policies that became sort of unpopular among voters. Trudeau has been this standard bearer of progressive politics in the times that he's been in power. What does his departure say about the popularity of those policies? When Trudeau came to power, he enjoyed an extended honeymoon with voters. He represented change and he was saying all the right things. But after a while, the public got tired of

what they believed was the government lecturing Canadians on what's best and that the liberals knew what was best. And he's been in power for almost a decade. So this is also a case of voter fatigue. I want to talk a little bit about the timing here because Trudeau's residing shortly before Donald Trump is set to take office as president. Trump has pledged to put a steep 25% tariff on imports from Canada. What does that, if anything, have to do with this situation and what does it mean for the next government? Well, the timing couldn't be worse given the threat of the 25% tariff.

And there's a lot of economic consternation here in Canada in regards to that tariff threat. Look, exports to the US are basically the lifeblood of the Canadian economy. So there is a risk of a bit of a power vacuum here in Canada with a seemingly lame duck prime minister in power that the Trump administration would have to deal with. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Vieira. Paul, thanks so much.

Thank you. Coming up, why is it so hard for some white-collar workers to get new jobs? That's after the break. In business news, U.S. Steel and Nepal Steel have filed a pair of lawsuits accusing President Biden, the president of the Steelworkers Union, and the chief executive of a rival company of conspiring to scuttle their $14 billion deal. The move comes after President Biden on Friday rejected the deal, which would have been the largest in the American steel industry in years. A White House spokeswoman said that Biden's decision

was based on national security and trade experts' determination that the deal would create national security risks. The Treasury Department, lead agency for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., declined to comment. The president of the United Steelworkers Union, also named in the suit,

said that the union is reviewing the complaint and will, quote, vigorously defend against these baseless allegations. Rival company Cleveland Cliffs said it is prepared to fight the lawsuit. And Disney has agreed to combine its Hulu Plus live TV streaming service with sports-focused Fubo TV. Under the agreement, Disney will own roughly 70 percent of Fubo, whose management team will operate the new venture. The deal will also end pending litigation over the formation of Venue Sports, a joint streaming venture between Disney's ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox Corp.

Fox and The Wall Street Journal's parent, News Corp., share common ownership. Hulu Plus Live TV and Fubo would continue to be offered as separate streaming services. In U.S. markets, indexes were mostly higher today. The Nasdaq led the pack with a gain of approximately 1.2 percent, while the S&P 500 rose about 0.6 percent. The Dow closed down less than 0.1 percent. For many of the 7 million Americans who are unemployed, finding a job is proving more difficult than they might have previously thought. According to the Labor Department,

on average it's taking people about 6 months to find a job, about a month longer than it did in early 2023. And as of November, the number of people searching for 6 months or more is up more than 50% since the end of 2022. Here to tell us more about what this means is Wall Street Journal reporter, Jasmine Lee. So Jasmine, by some metrics, the labor market appears healthy. The economy has added more than 2 million jobs over the past year,

but these numbers are telling a very different story. So which one is the real story? Is the labor market healthy or is it not healthy? So based on these big headline numbers, it looks healthy. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is at 4.2 percent. That's well below the pre-pandemic average. However, anecdotally, you hear a lot about people getting laid off left and right,

people having a harder time looking for a new job, people sending in these applications and never hearing back. And for this crowd of people who are looking for more than six months, what's unusual about these numbers is that this crowd is increasingly people who were in high paying white collar jobs. So for example, this is affecting people in tech, in law, in media. And that's partly because during the pandemic, these industries grew really fast,

and now they have not as much need for new hires. And there's also the idea that in the past year or so, bosses are aiming to be leaner, they wanna increase productivity, they're implementing more AI technology. What are workers doing if they can't find full-time employment in their field? So there are more than 4 million workers who are stuck working part-time, either because their hours were cut or because they can't find a full-time job.

So that number also has been growing for the past year or so. The industries that have stayed resilient in hiring are things like mining, manufacturing, transportation. And there's also health care and government work. So those two industries alone have been responsible for more than half of overall job creation in the past 12 months. So these industries are beating out things that are traditionally high paying.

More and more people are being forced to switch industries to find a new job. We looked into some surveys from ZipRecruiter and in the past six months, more than half of workers who got a new job said they changed fields in order to get a new job. Okay, so zooming out here, what does this trend say about the possibility of more layoffs for white-collar jobs in 2025? Recently, the labor market has been weakening mostly due to less hiring, not because of layoffs,

but according to an economist we spoke to, once companies decide to cut people or hire fewer people, that could snowball into further layoffs. There's also the idea of the white collar recession that's been happening over the past few years. There's a chance that that continues, but on a wider scale that just speaks to how hard it is for people to make these smart decisions about jobs

and pay when the economy keeps changing. That was Wall Street Journal reporter, Jasmine Lee. Thanks, Jasmine. Thank you. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi and Pierre Bienamé with supervising producer Matthew Walls. I'm Alex Osoloff for The Wall Street Journal.

We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.