Jobs? What jobs? Number of jobless up 203,000 in February

WASHINGTON —Did you notice on March 6 that Donald Trump didn’t brag about his so-called great economy? The reason: The number of jobless people jumped by 203,000 in February to 7.571 million. That’s also 467,000 more than in February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s second term.

Businesses claimed to shed a net of 92,000 jobs in February—when the economy really needed to create at least 93,000 new jobs that month, outside analyst Jed Kolko posted on the Economic Policy Institute’s website. It didn’t.

The unemployment rate rose slightly, too, from 4.3% this January to 4.4% this February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. And that wasn’t the only piece of bad economic news in the numbers. 

What BLS didn’t say, Kolko did; The economy must create an average of 120,000 new jobs monthly just to keep up with growth of new people entering the labor force. In February this year it needed to create 93,000. 

Add the 203,000 more unemployed in February to the 93,000 new jobs needed that month to keep the jobless rate from rising, and you come up with a gap of 296,000 jobs. And the big reason it isn’t wider isn’t the Trump slump. It’s his mass jailings and deportations of workers, who otherwise would be seeking work, Kolko calculated.

That monthly number has varied over 15 years, hitting a low of 40,000 new jobs monthly at the depths of the coronavirus-caused depression—when actual job losses were in the millions every month—and a high of more than 167,000 jobs monthly in early 2024, at the peak of the jobs climb as people resumed seeking work after remaining businesses emerged from that crash.

By contrast  during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, those monthly “new entrant” requirements were filled, with two or three exceptions, another of Kolko’s charts shows. Donald Trump won’t tell you that, either. Instead, he lies about Biden’s economic record.

Beside that jobs creation gap, other bad numbers kept coming in the BLS report.

BLS said 25.7% of the nation’s unemployed have been out of work for at least 25 weeks, meaning that in almost all cases they’ve exhausted their jobless benefits.

“Manufacturing jobs fell again, down 12,000 between January and February 2026,” tweeted Elise Gould, senior analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “Since January 2025, the manufacturing sector has lost 100,000 jobs. I repeat: The manufacturing sector lost 100K jobs since Trump took office.”

And even health care, usually a growing sector, shed 28,000 jobs in February, the data show, though BLS said that was due to a since-settled strike.

Trump’s “attacks on the federal workforce continue,” Gould added. “Federal employment has shrunk an alarming 327,000 jobs since January 2025. The vital services federal employees provide cannot be done without these essential workers. The cost of these losses are only beginning to be felt.”

They may be felt even more in coming month. The day before BLS issued its jobs report, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco allowed Trump and his worker-hating Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, to resume their destruction of 21 federal union contracts. Another 16 pacts are tied up in a similar case in federal court in D.C.

Trump, Vought and Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promptly trashed the pacts covering workers at Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Affairs and at the IRS. The Treasury Employees (NTEU) represents those workers (see separate story).

The jobs report shows ”This is an economy built for the billionaire bosses, not working people,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. 

Trump’s “big ugly bill”–the $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for the rich and the 1%–“is coming home to roost. Jobs are down in nearly every sector, and more cuts are coming as funding that industries need dries up. For months, the only growing area has been health care, and those jobs are being ripped away, too, which disproportionately affects women workers, especially women of color. 

“At the same time, energy prices are spiking and the cost of living overall is crushing working people. 

“No matter how the Trump administration tries to spin these awful numbers today, it’s clear working people need union contracts to support and protect them.”

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