Forget the Unemployment Rate
State Layoffs Reveal the Corporate Revolution Behind Job Market Revisions
The Insider Edge PODCAST on the Unemployment Rate.
Everyone wants to debate whether the unemployment rate is 4.2% or higher.
But here’s the truth: nobody cares about the unemployment rate when they can’t even land an interview for a job they’re highly qualified for.
Tell me… how many people in your network are months deep into job searches, sending 100+ apps, zero interviews?
The labor market is not a headline number. It’s structural, it’s shifting, and it is seriously showing up, especially in places like New Jersey and Virginia.
The Layoff Reality Check
A recent analysis by Techr, calculated layoffs per 100,000 workers using Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The results are not what you’d expect.
New Jersey: 1,843 layoffs per 100K (62% above the national average).
Vermont: 1,594
Virginia: 1,521
Florida: 1,490
New Hampshire: 1,410
Connecticut: 1,398
West Virginia: 1,396
Arkansas: 1,378
Rhode Island: 1,357
Wyoming: 1,347
At the other end, Minnesota came in lowest at 754 per 100K.
On the surface it’s just a ranking. But line it up with the Q2 revisions to payroll and household surveys and the signal gets louder.
New Jersey: the biggest payroll job losses in Q2 (establishment survey).
Virginia: weakness in the LAUS (household survey) numbers… where the damage looks worse than payroll suggests.
In other words: two separate surveys, plus a third-party layoff analysis, are all pointing in the same direction. That’s totally structure.
That gap between jobs “data” and “reality” is everything. The revisions prove the numbers can’t be trusted. Your lived experience proves the narrative can’t be trusted either.
Can we REALLY trust the BLS anymore?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a credibility problem. Everyone knows it.
Trump fired the BLS chief, claiming “rigged data.” But let’s be clear: revisions aren’t new. What’s new is that the numbers have lost all credibility with the public.
They revise jobs down by hundreds of thousands, then bury it in a footnote.
By the time anyone notices, markets have already priced the original fiction.
So no, I don’t trust the BLS. And at this point, who does? I look at way too much company and workfroce data to beleive those numbers. The hidden side of hiring is not even addressed.
But here’s the irony: the BLS surveys (payroll vs. household) contradict each other so often that the only way to make sense of them is to triangulate with outside data…. WARN notices, layoff trackers, and yes, even these state-by-state layoff rates.
And when all three are pointing at the same weak spots (New Jersey, Virginia, Vermont)… that’s when you know something real is happening.
“Strong labor market”?
Then why does it take 6 months on average to land a job?
Why are 1.8 million people trapped past 27 weeks… the highest in nearly a decade? Because the minute you’re long-term unemployed, the BLS deletes you.
The market isn’t strong. The data isn’t real. If you still quote the unemployment rate while people can’t even get interviews… you’re defending a fantasy, not an economy.
The Corporate Revolution Is HERE
What we’re seeing in the state-level numbers mirrors exactly what I’ve been writing about at the company level:
Ford is setting up for layoffs this year, restructuring white-collar roles before the headlines. New Jersey is one of their white-collar bases.
Microsoft just completed another round of cuts… while pretending “overall headcount is unchanged.” That’s workforce manipulation 101, and Virginia has been a hub for their enterprise sales org.
ADP … which literally runs payroll, is shrinking leadership and sales roles, even as it reports “solid earnings.” If states like New Jersey and Connecticut are bleeding jobs, ADP already sees it in real time.
Apple and JAMF both with heavy ties to enterprise management and are offshoring and cutting without much fanfare. That shows up in the fragility of states with higher concentrations of knowledge workers.
Halliburton just confirmed exactly what I wrote in April: profits dropped, rigs slowed, restructuring continued. West Virginia’s weakness isn’t a coincidence. Layoffs are coming. As they are with ConocoPhillips
Southwest Airlines is under Elliott Management’s pressure to “do more with less.” Florida, a key base, is on the high-layoff list for a reason.
The same pattern repeats and companies restructure as quet as they can… then states absorb the pain, and only months later does the “official” data catch up. Even then it doesn’t always tie up with everything I can see in workforce data which is a concern. What you are feeling is what I can see… and again it is much worse tha BLS numbers.
The unemployment rate can stay at 4% forever and it won’t matter.
The real economy runs on this:
If you’re a mid-career engineer in Connecticut who can’t get an interview, that 4% means nothing.
If you’re a sales director in Virginia whose role got “re-architected” into an offshore hub, you’re not in the numbers yet… but your job is gone.
If you’re a logistics worker in Florida watching volume collapse at distribution centers, the statistics won’t tell you how hard it is to find something comparable.
This is the Corporate Revolution in plain sight where job families being redefined, offshored, near shored or flat out erased. Payroll surveys and household surveys capture fragments of it. But layoff-per-100K data exposes it more directly.’
Watch the whole interview here
California and Texas actually held up best in Q2 revisions. That doesn’t mean they’re immune… it just means their size masks some of the turbulence. The real signal is that mid-tier states like New Jersey and Virginia are breaking first.
And no matter how the BLS spins the unemployment rate, the reality is this:
Workers don’t care about a percentage point.
They care about whether they can get an interview.
They care about whether the company that just posted record profits is still quietly cutting jobs.
State-level layoffs can be a small precursor.
They tell us where the Corporate Revolution is hitting hardest FIRST…
We are only just at the beginning. And if history is any guide, the revisions will only keep moving down. Watch out for offshoring and nearshoring stories. They are rarely in the news, but they are the true catalyst of why you can’t find a job in this market.
Oh and my advice- Be the obvious choice for the job. Not the most qualified. I’ve helped over 25K job seekers over the years. I’ve seen a thing or 2 that works.
The strongest candidates I’ve coached didn’t send or do anything flashy. From day one, they spoke to the company’s pain… often outlining how they’d solve a $10M ops bottleneck in the first call. It’s not about standing out. It’s about being the obvious answer.
