- The dismal August jobs report confirmed the labor market cooled significantly during the spring and summer. That coincided with the start of President Donald Trump’s trade war. While some tariff-impacted industries have seen minimal changes in payrolls, others like manufacturing and wholesale trade have taken bigger hits.
Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war earlier this year, industries impacted by tariffs have shed tens of thousands of jobs.
The latest jobs report revealed the U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs in August with revisions to prior months showing June actually saw a decline. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate edged up to a four-year high of 4.3%.
In a note on Saturday, Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, observed job growth in tariff-impacted sectors is negative, while those not affected by tariffs have seen slower growth but remain in positive territory.
Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have made that pinning down the exact start of his trade war a bit tricky. In February, he signed an executive order to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, but put the ones on Canada and Mexico on hold until March.
In April, he unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs on nearly all countries, but put those on hold after a week amid a market crash. Since then, Trump has reached deals with several trading partners while talks with China continue. But for more than 90 countries without such deals, so-called reciprocal tariffs took effect in August, though they also face a major legal challenge.
For his part, Sløk sees March as the start of the trade war and listed manufacturing, mining and logging, construction, wholesales trade, retail trade, transportation, and warehousing as the industries impacted by tariffs.
Using that timeline and those sectors, a deep dive into Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals which parts of the economy have been hurt the most.
Across all the tariff-impacted industries, payrolls fell by a net 90,100 after February—the last pre-trade war month. By contrast, payrolls overall grew by 385,000 during that span, as the health care and hospitality sectors, which are less affected by tariffs, have been the main drivers of job growth.
But even within tariff-impacted sectors, some areas have suffered more than others. For example, manufacturing shed 41,000 jobs, and wholesale trade lost 34,000.
But construction has been mostly flat, and retail trade even added 19,000 jobs. And while the mining and logging sector has lost 16,000 jobs, that category includes oil and gas extraction, which has been hit by lower crude prices and OPEC+ has ramped up production to grab market share.
To be sure, industries not directory affected by tariffs are cutting staff too, though that could be partly due to the general sense of economic uncertainty that the trade war has created.
For several months now, there have been more industries cutting jobs than adding them, a trend Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi warned “only happens when the economy is in recession.”
The Trump administration has maintained that its tax cuts and deregulation will stoke more growth, with tariffs eventually creating more jobs and encouraging companies to invest in domestic production.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said policies are in place that will create good, high-paying jobs. He also said payroll data collected in August has historically been prone to big revisions later, and he blamed the Federal Reserve for not cutting rates sooner.
“President Trump was elected for change, and we are going to push through with the economic policies that are going to set the economy right. I believe by the fourth quarter, we’re going to see a substantial acceleration,” Bessent predicted.
