America’s Labor Market Cracks: US Sheds 92,000 Jobs in February as Oil War Fears Cloud the Recovery

The American jobs market delivered a jarring shock in February, as the economy shed 92,000 nonfarm payroll jobs — a result that blindsided analysts, rattled financial markets, and revived deep anxieties about whether the United States is drifting toward a more serious economic downturn. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4%, up from 4.3% in January, defying consensus forecasts that had expected modest but positive job gains of around 50,000 to 60,000 positions.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the data on Friday morning, and the reverberations were immediate — stocks fell on Wall Street, economists scrambled to revise their outlooks, and political figures on both sides of the aisle seized on the figures as proof of their competing narratives about the health of the US economy.

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A Disappointing Miss — and Then Some

The headline number was bad enough on its own. But making the report worse, the Labor Department also revised downward its job totals for the two preceding months. December, originally reported as a gain of 48,000 jobs, was slashed to a loss of 17,000. January’s figure was trimmed from 130,000 to 126,000. Combined, those revisions erased an additional 69,000 jobs from the record.

With those adjustments, 2025 became the first year since 2010 — when the economy was still clawing its way out of the Great Recession — to record five months of labor market contractions. The comparison to the post-financial-crisis era underscores just how unusual and troubling the recent pattern of job losses has become.

“Well, that was ugly,” wrote Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, in a note following the release. “Downward revisions for the previous two months of December and January add further insult to injury, paring a total of 69,000 jobs.”

Samuel Tombs, chief US economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, was even blunter. “What stabilisation?” he wrote. “The idea the labor market has turned a corner implodes with this report.”

Healthcare Takes the Biggest Hit — Thanks to Strikes

For well over a year, the healthcare sector had been the backbone of US job creation, reliably adding an average of 36,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months. In February, that engine stalled dramatically, with the sector shedding 28,000 jobs — the primary driver of the month’s overall losses.

The culprit, in large part, was a major nurses’ strike at Kaiser Permanente that sidelined more than 30,000 healthcare workers across hospitals and clinics in Hawaii and California. Because the strike fell within the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey reference week, it was captured in the monthly count, pulling the sector sharply negative. The strike has since been resolved, and analysts expect a partial rebound in healthcare employment in March — but the February data cannot be undone.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, told CNN the report exposed how precarious the job market is when the one sector holding it upright suddenly buckles. She described healthcare as a “one-legged stool” propping up job creation, and said the month’s results showed what happens when that support disappears.

The Federal Workforce Keeps Shrinking

Healthcare was not alone in dragging the numbers lower. Federal government employment fell by another 10,000 jobs in February, continuing a sustained decline that began in late 2024. Since reaching a peak in October 2024, the federal workforce has contracted by 330,000 jobs — or 11% of its total headcount, according to BLS data.

The ongoing reduction reflects both natural attrition and deliberate policy choices by the Trump administration, which has made shrinking the size of the federal government a centerpiece of its economic platform. While White House officials have framed the cuts as fiscally responsible, critics argue the losses represent real jobs, real incomes, and real contractions in public service capacity.

A Multi-Sector Downturn

Beyond healthcare and government, the job losses in February were strikingly broad-based. Manufacturing shed 12,000 positions. Construction employment fell by 11,000, a decline the BLS attributed largely to cold weather disrupting activity across multiple US regions. Transportation and warehousing also lost 11,000 jobs, driven by declines among couriers and messengers. The information sector — which includes technology, media, and communications — dropped by 11,000, more than double its recent monthly average rate of decline.

The sole notable bright spot was the social assistance sector, which added 9,000 jobs, driven by gains in individual and family services. It was a thin silver lining against an otherwise gloomy backdrop.

Long-term unemployment also deteriorated significantly. The average duration of unemployment climbed to 25.7 weeks — the longest stretch since December 2021, when the economy was still bouncing back from pandemic-era dislocations.

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Wages Rise, But Context Is Everything

One data point within the report offered a measure of reassurance: wage growth held up better than expected. Average hourly earnings rose 0.4% for the month, bringing the year-over-year gain to 3.8% — both figures coming in 0.1 percentage points above forecast.

Nicole Bachaud, an economist at ZipRecruiter, told CNN that other underlying indicators within the report were also less alarming than the headline suggested. The number of people seeking part-time work for economic reasons fell, as did the number of marginally attached and discouraged workers. These signals, she argued, suggest the labor market’s foundation has not necessarily cracked — even if the surface looks battered.

Still, economists cautioned against reading too much comfort into strong wage growth at a time when oil prices are climbing sharply and inflation risks are rising. Higher wages alongside a shrinking workforce and surging energy costs is not a recipe for easy policymaking.

The Oil Shock and Its Cascading Effects

Running beneath all of these job market figures is the disruptive force of the US-Israel war in Iran, which has sent oil prices sharply higher in recent months. The energy shock is doing double damage to the US economy: raising input costs for businesses and households, while also dampening consumer confidence and spending.

The war in Iran has triggered a sharp rise in energy prices, amplifying the affordability anxiety that was already weighing on Americans before the conflict began. Employers were reportedly reluctant to expand hiring amid the uncertainty — a hesitancy that compounds the already cautious labour market environment born from two years of tariff turbulence and elevated interest rates.

“Companies are going to be even more reluctant to hire this spring until the war ends and they can see consumers still spending,” said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, in comments to PBS. “It’s a tense time for the US economy.”

Economists polled by Reuters had predicted an advance of around 59,000 jobs — a modest expectation that the actual numbers missed by an enormous margin. The range of estimates had stretched from a net loss of 9,000 to a gain of 125,000, meaning even the most pessimistic forecasts understated how bad February actually turned out.

The Fed’s Dilemma Deepens

For the Federal Reserve, the February report has made an already difficult policy environment considerably more complicated. Under normal circumstances, a weakening labour market would invite the Fed to cut interest rates — stimulating borrowing, spending, and hiring to shore up the economy.

But circumstances are far from normal. With oil prices rising and inflation risks re-emerging from the Middle East conflict, central bankers face the prospect of being caught between a rock and a hard place, as Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, put it. Cutting rates aggressively to support jobs could stoke inflation; holding rates steady to fight inflation could allow the labour market to deteriorate further.

The Fed’s next policy meeting is scheduled for March 17–18, and economists widely expect the central bank to hold its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 3.50%–3.75% range. However, the probability of a rate cut in June has risen in the wake of Friday’s report, as markets began pricing in the possibility that the Fed will ultimately need to ease in response to mounting economic weakness.

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly urged caution in interpreting the figures. “I don’t think you can look through this report,” she said, “but I also don’t think you should make more of it than one month of data.” Her measured tone reflected the difficult position policymakers now occupy: forced to take the report seriously without overreacting to a single month’s worth of volatile data.

Political Fallout: Trump’s Economy Under Scrutiny

The report landed as political fuel in a city already running hot on economic debate. President Donald Trump, who built much of his 2024 campaign on promises of economic revitalisation, now faces renewed scrutiny over the labour market’s stumbling performance.

Democrats moved quickly. Senator Elizabeth Warren said the figures proved that the White House was “tanking the job market.” Other lawmakers pointed to the persistent federal workforce reductions and the uncertainty created by the administration’s tariff and trade policies as contributing factors to broader hiring hesitancy.

White House officials pushed back. Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC he remained confident that strong growth would return. “There will be so much activity that everybody is going to be able to find a job that wants one,” he said, attributing the soft employment numbers to demographic shifts stemming from reduced immigration rather than any underlying economic weakness. Hassett noted that with immigration down substantially, the economy needs far fewer monthly job additions — perhaps as few as 30,000 to 40,000 — to keep unemployment stable.

Analysts were less sanguine. “Just when it looked like the labor market was stabilizing, this report delivers a knock-down blow to that view,” said Olu Sonola, head of US economics at Fitch Ratings. “It’s bad news whichever way you look at it.”

What Comes Next?

For investors and economists, all eyes now turn to whether March brings a healthcare rebound — or whether the February numbers represent the beginning of a deeper deterioration. A bounce in healthcare hiring is plausible given the strike’s resolution, but that would not reverse the losses seen in manufacturing, construction, transportation, or the federal government, all of which reflect broader structural and policy-driven pressures.

The GDP backdrop is also unsettling. The Commerce Department reported that the US economy grew at just a 1.4% annual rate in the final quarter of 2025, a below-trend performance that suggests the engine of growth was already losing power before February’s jobs figures arrived.

The labor market has averaged fewer than 5,000 new jobs per month since Trump took office in January 2025 — a figure that, even accounting for reduced immigration and demographic shifts, represents a striking deceleration from the job creation of prior years. Whether policymakers, businesses, and consumers can find a path to renewed momentum — through a resolution of the Middle East conflict, a stabilisation of oil prices, or a shift in Fed policy — remains very much an open question.

For now, February’s job market report stands as a stark reminder that the American economy’s resilience is not guaranteed, and that the forces bearing down on it — geopolitical, inflationary, and structural — are neither small nor fleeting.

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By: Montel Kamau

Serrari Financial Analyst

9th March, 2026