:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-2247678973-c45c2880396d40faaf01309bce66c4ac.jpg "For Better or Worse, Health Care Is America’s Employment Engine")
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Key Takeaways
- Manufacturing, once the largest employer in the U.S. economy, has shed jobs consistently since 2022. Health care has gained them.
- The two sectors have been on opposite trajectories since 2008, when health care employment first exceeded manufacturing.
If you want to picture a typical American worker, forget the overalls and hardhat, and think scrubs and a stethoscope.
As of January, more than 18 million people worked in health care, compared to 12 million in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And those two sectors have been headed in opposite directions in recent years.
Factory jobs evaporated nearly every month, despite an unusual increase of 5,000 in the most recent jobs report Wednesday. Health care added 137,000 jobs in January, offsetting an employment decline in other sectors.
Total employment in 2025 would have declined if not for the fact that health care added 33,000 jobs each month, economists at BMO Capital Markets said in a research note.
What This Means For The Economy
The fact that job gains are concentrated in health care suggests the labor market may be more fragile than it would appear, despite a healthy top-line number.
The ranks of health care workers are growing as the population ages. Meanwhile, automation and trade turmoil drain away employment opportunities in the once-dominant manufacturing sector, despite President Donald Trump’s tariff policies intended to spark a “renaissance.”
“Health care continues to drive the bulk of job creation in the U.S. economy, while most other labour market indicators … remain soft,” Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO, wrote.
