How the job market got so broken

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and the Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers can now watch our video roundtable on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod cohost Drew Millard. They’ll also receive an invite to our upcoming “hauntology” reading group, which we’ll tell you more about soon. (Just so you know: We’ll also be inviting anybody kind enough to tip us a buck or two to support our work).

It’s October, and we still don’t have the September jobs report because the government shut down. But the data we do have shows a clear trend: Job growth is slowing, unemployment is ticking up, and cities like New York are seeing the weakest labor market gains in decades. If you’ve noticed more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn, heard stories about people applying to thousands of positions, or felt the chill in your own job search, you’re not imagining it: The job market sucks right now, and things have been headed in this direction since before Trump took office.

To wrap our head around how we got here (tariffs? offshoring? AI and automation?), we brought on the best person we could think of to explain it: Richard D. Wolff, a longtime faculty member at places like The New School and UMass Amherst, author of myriad books on economic methodology and class analysis, a founding director of Democracy at Work, and one of the most prominent Marxist economists in America. (Full disclosure: Rick’s work on class and labor were tremendously influential on Andrea’s work as a sociology student.)

In part one of our two-part conversation, Rick explains why today’s shaky job market is just the latest phase in a decades-long trend that began in the 1970s—and, in his view, a symptom of an empire (and economic system) on the verge of collapse. We also get into the flawed logic behind Trump’s tariff and immigration policies, the real reasons offshored jobs aren’t “coming back,” and why China’s working class is seeing wage growth while American workers are stuck in place.

Follow Rick’s work at Democracy at Work—and watch his Economic Update podcast.