More labor market blues
Marketplace
American Public Media
4.6 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Business owners aren’t too optimistic about the labor market, according to an NFIB survey. About a third are struggling to fill an open position, and around a quarter said labor quality was their most pressing issue. In this episode, we scrape together a picture of today’s labor market, sans government data. Plus: Cities issue bonds at a record pace, we explain the consequences of Trump’s proposal to back 50-year mortgages and one report shows real wage growth has slowed to 2%.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Worried about your future in tech? |
| 0:03.4 | Master new skills. |
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| 0:20.2 | Transform your work. Transform your work. |
| 0:22.1 | Transform your team. |
| 0:24.1 | Ready to tap in? |
| 0:25.9 | Visit us at pluralsight.com to learn more. |
| 0:32.1 | We'll do some labor market. |
| 0:34.4 | We'll do some bond market. |
| 0:36.6 | And then we're going to talk condiments. From American |
| 0:41.4 | public media. This is Marketplace. |
| 0:49.7 | I'm Kai. Rizda. It is Tuesday today, the 11th of November. Good as always to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:59.7 | If we are lucky, and believe you, me, we are as ready as you are not to be talking about private data anymore. |
| 1:07.1 | But if we're lucky, this will be the last week or so. We're going to have to do that. |
| 1:11.7 | Today's installment comes to us in the form of the National Federation of Independent Business's Small Business Optimism Index down just a hair in October, though still more optimistic than not. |
| 1:23.6 | Dig down a bit, though, and there are some cracks. |
| 1:26.3 | 32% of small business owners say they've got jobs. They cannot fill. 27%. said labor quality is their single most important problem, the highest that's been, since right about now back in 2021. Marketplace's Kristen Schwab gets us going. |
| 1:41.8 | Of all the things on business owners to do lists, |
| 1:45.1 | hiring is not usually anyone's favorite, says Aaron Sojourner at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for |
| 1:50.8 | employment research. Employers, especially small business employers, are perennially upset about their |
... |
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