Professional and Business Services jobs are down five months and seven of last eight.
Buried in a modest gain of 41,000 jobs in the December ADP Report is a sobering new trend in white collar employment.
Professional and Business Services Details
- April: +1,000
May: -13,000
June: -57,000
July: +9,000
August: -1,000
September: -6,000
October: -22,000
November: -18,000
December: -29,000
Month-Over-Month Change in White Collar Jobs
Net jobs from professional and business services plus information was negative for 8 of the last 9 months.
Month-Over-Month Change in White Collar Jobs Detail
- April: +15,000
May: +8,000
June: -63,000
July: +46,000
August: -14,000
September: -6,000
October: -30,000
November: -48,000
December: -45,000
Month-Over-Month Change in Professional and Business Services + Information
- April: -9,000
May: -9,000
June: -51,000
July: +18,000
August: -14,000
September: -5,000
October: -40,000
November: -39,000
December: -41,000
Month-Over-Month Change in Jobs by Category Detail
Month-Over-Month Change in Manufacturing Jobs
- April: +3,000
May: -6,000
June: +18,000
July: +7,000
August: -18,000
September: +2,000
October: -4,000
November: -18,000
December: -5,000
Job Synopsis
Manufacturing is in a big slump, small business employment is dismal, and now white collar jobs are weakening dramatically.
The white collar weakness is related to AI.
Small business weakness and manufacturing weakness are related to tariffs and a generally weakening economy.
But hey, Trump says this is the greatest economy in history.
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January 5, 2026: ISM Manufacturing Contracts for the 36th Time in 38 Months
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January 7, 2026: ADP Payrolls Gain 41,000 in Year-End Medium-Size Business Employment
After a horrific November, small businesses ended the year on a positive note.
It’s all going to shit and it’s Trumpkin’s doing.
Seriously, though, it was predictable.
How many were delayed unemployment stats from the government employee buyouts? I know my brother lost his job, but the golden parachute severance lasted many months after his last physical day in the office. Who knows if his company is reporting fewer jobs? Some states won’t pay an unemployment claim until severance pay has “run out” to avoid double dipping.
Good points. But I do think depending on the size of the company, and if severance is involved its usually a big enough company to have to file a Warn notice .
I think the numbers is 2,000 that will get layed off then they have to file the Warn notice with the government . But yeah, I am not sure if they severance delays the reporting as to when they are actually unemployed
Good question for Mike
And the worst is yet to come, curtesy of AI and outsourcing abroad. Personally I’m used to it since 1996.
Meanwhile, Cea Weaver says that homeownership is racist, and her mother owns a $1.5 million house in Tennessee.
I can say that the European socialists were at least lower-middle or working class. The American version is the vomit variety.
Here’s a personal holiday story. Had a family member I hadn’t seen in 25 years come over for the holidays, got herself into some trouble over a failed business and breaking a lease for her business.
She was receiving threatening letters from the landlord about lawsuit but, despite not being very bright, she was smart enough to use AI to ask how to startup the company. It told her to form an LLC and put all assets in there insulating herself from the now bankrupt business. She had talked to a lawyer about setting up the LLC but they wanted $5000 so she asked AI how else to do it and it printed the forms and told her how to file the paperwork.
She now asked AI if she is insulated from the lawsuit and it confirmed it is like but to check with a lawyer. she takes all the legal docs the landlord sends her, scans them uploads them to AI and has AI respond (in a legal tone) to all the letters.
If my not-too-well educated family member can figure out how to use AI to create a corporation, use it as a lawyer, break a lease then what will real lawyers do?
Finally, I asked her why she didn’t use AI to help her with her business issues. She said she had already bought the franchise before she discovered AI but will do it next time she does something else. Evidently, she was sold a bunch of lies and product she never needed.
I’ve used AI for similar things including tax advisory, financial advisory, investment advisory and many other things reducing my need to talk to any real professional for nothing more than to confirm the strategy/information is correct or not. Instead of them billing me for 10 hours at $200/hr, I get 1 hr for $200.
Now I’ll just wait for a comment from a insurance/tax/financial/investment/legal advisor saying it will lead to gloom and doom for using AI instead of them at their overpriced rates.
Thinking she used Legalzoom or something similiar?
Just make sure she did not personally guarantee the lease.
Will AI represent her in court as well?
Boilerplate is the easy stuff. AI copies it from other sources.
BTW, your lawyer is cheap. A good lawyer will run you close to $2K/hour (higher in NY, DC etc). It is worth $2k/hour when you win.
Only if the judge allows her to have a laptop in the courtroom. Don’t see why not, a computer (AI) will have instant access to every court decision and opinion in seconds. I suspect AI will be better than 80% of lawyers out there today and in a few years it will be better than 100% of the lawyers out there.
The problem is that the judge is not going to give her the time to type her questions, read the answers and then respond
It’s not artificial intelligence. It is a language learning model. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s like a brand new human intern except it makes the same mistakes after 6 months to a year while the actual human intern learns from their mistakes and starts to improve their performance. Your family member is essentially using Google to act as her own lawyer and has a fool for a client. Before AI was around Al Gore’s would have identified the benefit of an LLC relative to a.sole proprietorship, so there is nothing special about what the AI told her that wasn’t already available elsewhere. There’s probably also a “How to Start a Business for Dummies” book on that, too. And to David’s point, she essentially used AI as a free version of LegalZoom.
There is a lot of money to be made shorting AI companies if someone can get the timing right. The insider trading activity for all these Mag 7 and tech companies is a sea of stock sales. Virtually nobody is buying their own stock. It’s not until you.look.at value buys like VFC and EL that you see these insiders putting their money where their mouth is.
Don’t discount AI. Computer scientists and neurologists have been working on AI since the 1980’s. It suddenly became a thing in 2020. Why? Because of an invention by a Google researcher called the “Attention Mechanism”. This is a bit of logic code that gets applied at each level to the data as it moves through the matrix of processors. Research will ensure that code gets better and better over time. Secondly, massive effort is being applied to getting rid of the “garbage in”. AI today is good for 80% of tasks, maybe 90% of easy tasks. That last bit is the hard part. But it will get there. And it will get there faster than most can imagine.
I doubt he has ever used a good lawyer to know the difference.
Then, we do not need judges in court either.
If our laws were written correctly, we wouldn’t now.
Of course by your reasoning the judge should also be AI.
LMAO. Does it get any dumber?
What you imply though is correct. The only people with jobs will have IQs over 140, smart enough to know when AI is wrong. That’s a prediction btw.
There are tasks for which the Government should have online guides, because they normally do not need a lawyer. Such as setting up a tiny single-person company. Accountants can fill and file the papers, people should not hire lawyers for such tasks.
But AI or Machine-Do-This has already destroyed industries, as Silicon Valley destroyed the middle-class musician first with their “free or almost free music” a few years ago. The findings of Jaron Lanier were staggering.
AI will be a structural job killer this year – not “forcing humans to do higher things”, but forcing them to the unemployment line.
This time it’s different, and Trump seems to be very unlucky. First Covid, now this.
Bad things happen in all presidencies. How you choose to respond makes you either great or a moron. Guess which one Trump consistently chooses?
It’s risky… you don’t know when it’s gonna flat out lie to you, but i guess it’s that way with humans too.
They’ll be needed at the frontlines of battle:
Venezuela, Minnesota, Greenland, New York, Cuba, Columbia, California, Mexico, Illinois or Colorado…
Endless opportunities opening up very quickly.
The taco ecomony is firmly in place. The “best” is yet to be under King Herod.
“But hey, Trump says this is the greatest economy in history.”
It works, thanks to the collective stupidity of the American populace. Why would he not do this when he knows his sheep will bleat with obeisance?
They are obsolete.
Some of us still believe having a services side of our economy is a positive factor for the US economy. Feel free to disagree.
Certainly services is a positive, but shouldn’t the economy be balanced with services, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.?