On track for a layoffs record
Marketplace
American Public Media
4.6 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The U.S. is on track for the largest number of announced layoffs since 2020. Yay us! (Kidding.) We can thank a combination of federal cuts and their ripple effects, an uncertain trade environment, and AI experimentation. After that, Jenny Han of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” tells Kai about her career journey from nanny and school librarian to novelist and Amazon Prime showrunner. Plus: recession indicators, a federally-backed lithium mine and industrial outdoor storage.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I could say we're going to do the labor market and recession indicators, which we are, but mostly on the program today, summer romance. |
| 0:12.3 | From American public media. |
| 0:14.6 | This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdal. It is Thursday, today, October 2. |
| 0:29.3 | Good as always to have you along, everybody. |
| 0:31.3 | We begin today with the American labor market. |
| 0:34.8 | We do so for a couple of reasons. |
| 0:37.4 | Number one, if your routine on the |
| 0:39.3 | first Friday of every month is to fire up your computer at 830 Washington time to check on the |
| 0:43.9 | monthly unemployment report, you can go ahead and take tomorrow off. The Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| 0:49.5 | has been declared non-essential, and so a jobs report there will not be. But and number two, gold standard, |
| 0:58.2 | though it may be, the jobs report ain't the only labor market indicator in town. Chicago Fed |
| 1:03.4 | President Austin Goolsby and I talked yesterday about how this is a low-hiring, low-firing job |
| 1:09.3 | market right now. Companies aren't adding a whole lot of jobs, |
| 1:12.4 | nor are they cutting many either. That said, though, and while most companies are holding on to people, |
| 1:18.3 | the outplacement firm Challenger Gray in Christmas says this morning, employers have announced |
| 1:22.4 | more layoffs so far this year than in any year since 2020. So Marketplace's Henry Ep starts us off with this look at |
| 1:31.0 | which parts of this economy are cutting and why. A huge chunk of the layoffs announced so far this |
| 1:37.0 | year happened months ago when Elon Musk was swinging a prop chainsaw around a conference stage and |
| 1:42.5 | firing federal workers on mass. |
| 1:45.3 | Andy Challenger is Senior Vice President at Challenger Grand Christmas. |
| 1:48.3 | That has really spiked the number and in a real way added to the pool of Americans that |
| 1:57.5 | are looking for work. |
... |
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