Monday morning musings for workplace watchers
Counting AI’s Job Impact | Unemployment in DC
Parker Purifoy: Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling believes his agency can get big companies to help predict how artificial intelligence will change the job market in coming years.
The Labor Department is in the process of securing data-sharing agreements with large corporations to find out how new technology is being implemented and how it is affecting the workforce, Sonderling said at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ expo last week.
“Industry is the one developing these tools, they’re the ones buying these tools, they know where the market is going and where the technology is going,” he said. “We can’t be lagging behind that. We have to be at the table with them.”
Sonderling said he thinks that AI isn’t putting people out of work but that the emerging technology will change the way people do their work. The DOL’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is planning to use data from tech companies and Fortune 500 companies to study whether AI is displacing workers or transforming the roles of workers, he said.
“The public deserves to know from a credible institution like the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” he said, adding that layoffs could be a result of shifting corporate strategies instead of AI replacement. “We either want to dispel that narrative or, if there’s any truth to that, then we have a very important role to play for those workers to make sure they get back into the workforce and have the skills they need.”
Sonderling, who took the reins as acting labor secretary when Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in late April, has been speaking at various events for months about the DOL’s role in the AI boom, making it a central part of the department’s policy goals.
The DOL has so far rolled out an AI literacy training program in partnership with tech company Arist. It also released an AI literacy guide for employers and organizations that are educating workers and instructed state training agencies to include the framework in their programs. Sonderling’s comments last week suggest there could be more on the horizon.
Ian Kullgren: President Donald Trump’s effort to make Washington “beautiful again” has done little to bring down the persistently high unemployment rate in the District.
While Trump focuses on improving the cosmetics—painting the National Mall reflecting pool Mar-a-Lago blue and tearing up the city’s main public golf course—the city’s residents are still struggling to find work more than anywhere else in the country. The March unemployment rate for DC was adjusted upward to 6.3%, the highest in the nation.
Trump’s efforts to cut the federal workforce hurt the local economy: federal employees make up as much as 23% of the workforce.
The numbers suggest that many separated federal workers have yet to find new jobs—and show that DC’s employment landscape lags behind the rest of the nation.
It’s not just white-collar workers. More than 17% of DC residents already lived in poverty before Trump’s cuts, compared to 12% nationally, according to US Census Bureau surveys.
Unemployment in the district was about 47% higher than the national average and more than double the rate in Nebraska and New Hampshire. Employers nationwide added 115,000 jobs in April after adding 185,000 the previous month, marking the biggest two-month increase since 2024, according to federal numbers released Friday.
Meanwhile, DC lost 800 workers in March, the most recent month for which data are available.
And the unemployment rate may underestimate the problem. The labor force shrank by 1,800 workers in March, meaning those people had stopped looking for work and were therefore excluded from the unemployment rate.
Some of the more than 300,000 federal workers who left during Trump’s first year have struggled to find new jobs. For example, many at the US Agency for International Development had to find new careers after the global aid space was decimated by Trump’s cuts. Grant writers and others with uniquely governmental roles also face a tight job market in the wake of Trump’s cuts.
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