Our Sick Economy by Harold Meyerson

[justaprogressive]

In 2021, historian Gabriel Winant authored a remarkable book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, that told the story of both 20th-century Pittsburgh and the transformation of the American workforce. Its focus was the decline of the steel industry, which had dominated the Pittsburgh economy, and the rise of the health care industry, which came to dominate that same economy as steelworkers either aged out of their jobs or saw those jobs eliminated, in both cases saddled with industry-related infirmities that required medical care. Its focus was also the challenge to the Pittsburgh economy as the number of steelworkers dwindled (their union had made them among the best-paid blue-collar workers in America), and the number of health care workers rose (whose wages weren’t comparable to the steelworkers’, though the subsequent unionization of a number of them only partly diminished that gap).

I was reminded of Winant’s book by last week’s reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which documented the declining number of workers in virtually every sector of the economy over the past 13 months, save only health care. During 2025, the number of workers employed in the manufacturing, construction, and retail sectors dropped by 115,000. The health care industry, by contrast, added 437,000 net new workers, while the social assistance sector, which consists chiefly of home health care aides, grew by 321,000.

The overall private-sector economy grew by just 181,000 jobs last year, which means that it would have ended up with 577,000 fewer jobs on December 31 than it had on the previous January 1, had health care and social assistance not boosted it into positive numbers.

These trends have continued into this year. The BLS report for January of this year shows that nearly all the jobs created last month were in health care and social assistance. Jobs in construction also increased, but that was largely attributable to the boom in data centers. The number of jobs in residential construction continued to shrink.

https://prospect.org/2026/02/16/economy-health-care-jobs-labor-statistics-bls-ai/