The unemployment rate for veterans dipped to 3.2% in May, bolstered by a gains among women veterans despite fears that artificial intelligence could trigger layoffs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report released Friday.
The jobless rate for all veterans fell from 3.7% in April to 3.2% in May. The rate for the post-9/11 veterans ticked up from 4.0% in April to 4.1% in May but was still down from 4.5% in March, the bureau’s report said.
One trend in the report was the continuing improvement among the nation’s 2.1 million women veterans, as shown by a three-month surge – from an unemployment rate of 7.1% in March to 4.4% in April and 3.3% in May.
The last time the unemployment rate for women veterans was less than the rate for male veterans was in January 2019, when women veterans had a jobless rate of 2.7%, compared to 3.0% for male veterans.
However, the BLS has issued occasional cautionary notes on the data for women veterans, stating that the data comes from a much smaller sample than for male veterans and was thus susceptible to greater fluctuations.
One reason women veterans may be doing better on the jobs market is that more employers are realizing that “women make excellent employees,” said Heather Long, chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union.
In her estimation, the latest jobs report showed that the market’s recent “low hire, low fire” environment had come to an end. “The hiring recession is over,” Long said in a phone interview Friday.
She also noted that wages were not keeping up with inflation – the BLS said that wages were up 3.4% in May while the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in a recent report projected that Consumer Price Index for May would come in a 4.2%.
“It’s a split-screen economy,” Long said, noting that job growth was continuing while the nation was at war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was closed, inflation was ticking up, the nationwide average for a gallon of regular gasoline Friday was $4.24, and the main concern of voters in numerous surveys was “affordability.”
The improving performance of women veterans was unsurprising to Kevin Rasch, the Warriors to Work regional director at the Wounded Warrior Project.
“Employers recognize the value of having veterans” on the payroll, Rasch said. “They bring a lot of value to the table,” he said in a phone interview Friday – and that recognition was now being given to women veterans.
Rasch recently returned from a trip to Germany where he visited U.S. bases to speak with active duty troops to learn of their concerns about transitioning back to civilian life in the states.
“AI is one of the hot topics” for those transitioning troops who feel that they could be at a disadvantage in the civilian jobs market, Rasch said. His team was prepared to coach those transitioning veterans on coping with AI, Rasch said, but he also said that “AI is not going away.”
Rasch said job seekers should not automaticall blame AI when they lose out on a position because “someone learned how to use AI better than you.”
The predictions ahead of the release of the BLS jobs report suggested that AI would be a factor in job losses. “AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs and the primary industry citing it is technology,” Andy Challenger, labor and workplace expert and chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement prior to the release of the BLS report.
The BLS report said that total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 172,000 jobs in May, which was similar to the gain of 179,000 jobs in April.
“Leisure and hospitality added 70,000 jobs in May, well above the average monthly gain of 14,000 over the prior 12 months,” the BLS report said. Food services and bars added 48,000 jobs, health care added 35,000 and manufacturing added 7,000.
“This is about the strongest market of my lifetime,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNBC of the job gains.
He attributed the gains to President Donald Trump’s policies, including the tax cuts he enacted last year.
