The Real Story of 2025 Job Destruction

The Labor Arbitrage Story That Government Stats Don’t Tell You

For most of 2025, the labor market narrative was deceptively simple: layoffs slowed, unemployment stayed “low,” and corporate leaders insisted that restructuring was largely complete. Headcount, they said, was “relatively stable.” In some cases, it was even “growing again.”

That story is technically defensible… and also fundamentally false.

What actually …