Five hundred and eighty thousand. That's the number of open manufacturing jobs posted in July, according to the Labor Department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — known as JOLTS — released this week. Up from 501,000 in June. Up from 428,000 a year ago.
Somewhere, a CNN economics correspondent is staring at a spreadsheet and quietly closing the tab.
The numbers are hard to argue with, though we're sure Democrats will try. Durable goods vacancies alone surged to 429,000 in July, up from 353,000 the month before and 255,000 at this time last year. The Commerce Department separately reported that durable goods orders climbed 1.1 percent — more than twice what economists had predicted. Factories aren't just hiring. They're expanding.
This is the economy we were told couldn't happen. The tariffs were supposed to crater manufacturing. The trade war was supposed to gut the heartland. Every legacy outlet from the New York Times to MSNBC ran variations of the same funeral notice for American industry starting in 2025. And yet here we are, with factory openings at levels not seen since 2023 and an overall unemployment rate sitting at 4.1 percent.
Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has acknowledged the labor market is near full employment — a phrase the Federal Reserve doesn't throw around casually. Jobless claims have dropped to their lowest point in over four decades. The layoff rate hit 1 percent in July, with total layoffs at 1.666 million — one of the lowest marks on record. Companies aren't just not firing people. They can't find enough people to hire.
The broader economy added context to the manufacturing surge. Total job openings across all sectors rose to 7.3 million, up from 7.2 million the prior month. Total hiring came in at 5.05 million. The quit rate held at 1.9 percent, with 3.1 million workers voluntarily leaving their jobs — the kind of number that only makes sense when people are confident they can find something better.
Regional Federal Reserve banks in Kansas City, Dallas, New York, and Philadelphia have all tracked the same trend: manufacturing activity accelerating in ways their own models didn't forecast six months ago. Part of the tightness stems from reduced immigration flows and demographic shifts that have shrunk the availability of cheap labor. Which will have the added bonus of driving up wages for Americans.
The critics who predicted a tariff-driven recession have a neat trick for moments like this. They don't retract the prediction. They just stop talking about it. The doomsday models get quietly shelved, the apocalyptic op-eds get buried under new ones about something else, and nobody ever goes back to check the tape.
Manufacturing hiring did dip slightly from 330,000 in June to 288,000 in July, and durable goods hiring slipped from 208,000 to 177,000. Those numbers will get cherry-picked by someone looking for a cloud in an otherwise clear sky. But a slowdown in hiring when you've already posted 580,000 open positions isn't weakness. It's a labor market that literally cannot fill fast enough.
Two years of tariff policy. A three-year high in factory job openings. The lowest jobless claims in forty years. A layoff rate of one percent.
The economic catastrophe must be running behind schedule.