Canada lost 68,000 jobs in September and Australia lost 39,300, while Germany’s unemployment count, though lower than in August, was 40,000 higher than a year earlier. The three reports, released between 30 September and 15 October 2026, all show unemployment rising on an adjusted or annual basis, but the details differ: in Canada the losses … Read more
A worker in the Italian Mezzogiorno faces unemployment odds more than four times higher than a worker in the country’s industrialized north, according to the OECD’s Employment Outlook 2026, released July 7. In Newfoundland’s Division No. 9, unemployment sat at 29 percent versus 3.3 percent in Quebec’s Nicolet-Yamaska, a nine-to-one gap within a single country. The … Read more
Two things are true about the labor market right now, and they seem to contradict each other. Overall layoff activity in the US is running at its slowest pace in four years. At the same time, a steady stream of large, recognizable companies have announced significant workforce cuts within the same few weeks: Uber, Microsoft, … Read more
On November 30, 2025, 2.83 million people sat China’s national civil service exam at the same time, in 250 cities, competing for 38,100 government positions. One of those positions, an entry-level police officer role at an immigration repatriation center in Ruili, a small city on the Myanmar border, drew 6,470 applications for a single opening. … Read more
Seven in ten workers globally say they are worried AI will lead to widespread unemployment. A recent BBC panel debate in the UK put that question to a room of people with direct stakes in the answer: a tech entrepreneur, an economist, a Labour politician, a company experimenting with AI in real time, and a … Read more
On June 10, Anthropic announced two new commitments totalling $350 million. The larger piece, $200 million, goes to an Economic Futures Research Fund, an expansion of a program the company launched a year earlier to fund empirical research and policy trials on AI’s economic effects. The fund will back research trials and what the company … Read more
The headline number looks reassuring. Global unemployment is projected to hold at 4.9 percent in 2026, near the lowest level in decades. If that were the whole story, the world of work would be in decent shape. It is not the whole story. The International Labour Organization’s Employment and Social Trends 2026 report, published in … Read more
Before getting to the list, one distinction worth holding onto, because it is the thing most “fastest-growing jobs” articles get wrong. There are two different ways to measure a growing job, and they produce almost opposite lists. A job can grow fast in percentage terms while adding very few actual positions, simply because it started … Read more
There is no single Asian job market. A new graduate in Shanghai and one in Tokyo are living through opposite problems at the same moment: one is competing against a record flood of fellow graduates for too few jobs, the other is being courted by employers who cannot find enough workers. Both realities are happening … Read more
The conversation about AI and employment tends to split into two camps: the catastrophists and the optimists. Neither is particularly useful if you’re trying to figure out what’s actually happening to the job market right now. Here are five developments worth paying attention to. 1. The entry-level hiring slowdown is real — and it predates … Read more