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U.S. employers hired robustly in April, showing continued confidence in the economy even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs on U.S. trading partners made consumers and investors shudder.
The economy added 177,000 jobs, just a tick lower than the 185,000 added in March, with major gains in health care, transportation and warehousing, and financial services.
Federal government employment shrank by 9,000 in April as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to slash federal jobs. Since January, federal payrolls have shrunk by 26,000. (Workers on paid leave are counted as employed in the data.)
The unemployment rate remained at 4.2%.
The survey on which the jobs report is based was conducted in mid-April, the week after “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced.
“In other words, the establishment survey and the household survey were carried out during a week with extreme levels of uncertainty for businesses,” Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Sløk noted earlier this week.
The jobs report is among the first pieces of hard data since Trump’s early April tariff announcement, and indicates that, at least for now, businesses’ complaints and consumer pessimism about tariffs’ disruptive nature have not translated into a hiring slowdown.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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https://fortune.com/2025/05/02/employers-kept-hiring-steadily-in-april-unfazed-by-tariff-announcements/
Irina Ivanova
