May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries'just don't call it a boom. Last year, America's job market was trapped in what my colleague Roge Karma described as the Big Freeze. Unemployment was low'people who wanted jobs largely had them'but finding new work was difficult: The hiring rate was as slow as it had been since the start of the pandemic. Now we're in something like a spring thaw. Employers have added, on average, 114,000 jobs a month this year. Compared with 2025, when the average was just 10,000 a month, the number represents a notable reversal. But this is moderate growth, not a radical expansion, and hiring is just one metric of many for determining the health of the economy. Think of these changes as a cautious transition into a new phase. The great hiring slowdown of 2025 had a few possible explanations. When President Trump returned to...
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