Unemployment rate jumps to 4-year high in November

San José, CA – On Tuesday, December 16 the Department of Labor released the monthly jobs report for November, after skipping the October report because of the federal government partial shutdown. The official unemployment rate jumped to 4.6% in November, up from 4.4% in September, hitting a new four-year high. This year, the unemployment rate has gone up 4.0% in January to 4.8%, a 20% increase in the rate, under the Trump administration.

The rise in unemployment has hit African Americans the hardest, as their unemployment rate has soared from 6.2% in January to 8.3% last month, climbing by more than a third this year. In contrast, the unemployment rate for white Americans has gone up too, but only 3.5% in January to 3.9% in November, an increase of a bit more than 10%. So the ratio of Black to white unemployment has gone from 1.77 in January to 2.13 in November. This is in part a reflection of the long history of Black Americans being “last hired, first fired” and in part the racist policies of the Trump administration, in particular the big cuts in federal government workforce, which disproportionately hits Black workers.

The October and November reports on net new jobs saw a loss of 105,000 in October, mainly from federal workers who took buyouts from the DOGE cuts six months earlier.

In the last six months, three have seen job losses, while three showed gains. During this time there was a net gain of just 100,000 jobs, or an average of 17,000 per month.

The actual numbers might be worse, as the annual adjustments have been to lower the job creation by about 50,000 jobs a month. If this holds true for the adjustment, or benchmarking, for 2025, the economy would have been losing jobs for the last six months at an average monthly rate of 33,000 per month.

Despite Trump’s goal of “reshoring” manufacturing to the United States through higher tariffs, in fact manufacturing companies have shed jobs every month since Trump proclaimed “liberation day” when he announced higher tariffs on almost every country in the world in April. One problem is that Trump has also tariffed many inputs like steel and aluminum that are needed for manufacturing, making production more expensive in the United States, offsetting the tariffs on imports of finished goods.

While Trump has said that high tariffs under the McKinley administration (1897-1901), during the time of U.S. industrialization, he forgets that it was immigrants, not native-born Americans, who filled the factories at the turn of the century. Trump has not only stopped immigrants and refugees at the U.S./Mexican border, he has terrorized communities with deportation raids, and is limiting legal immigrants and refugees.

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