The layoffs are low because replacing a worker is expensive, and no amount of managerial virtue changes the bill. In U.S. Workers Suffer Fewest Layoffs Since 1969, James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal takes a 57-year low in layoffs and reads it as a verdict on politics: businesses are free to manage, managers prove diligent and competent, Democrats will regret giving Donald Trump credit for the economy, and one staff departure from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office is offered as a jab at collectivism generally. A number, a worldview, and no reason attached to the number.
Start with what he gets right. Freeman’s best line is aimed at the professional forecasters who have been announcing that new technology would wipe out jobs for more than a century, and the latest figures make them wrong again. That lands. Fewer layoffs are genuinely good news. A layoff is not a line on a chart. It is a lost paycheck, lost health coverage, a damaged credit score, maybe a U-Haul. Competent managers really can avoid needless firings once the work exists. Granted, all of it.
But competence cannot manufacture orders. A layoff is an employer pulling a job; a weekly claims figure is a person who lost work and filed for benefits. Two different clocks. A worker who quits for a better job never files a claim, and a firm can quietly cut a shift without anyone in the building filing anything that week. Freeman stacks both records into one triumph and never asks why employers stopped announcing cuts.
Ask an employer why the machinist is still on the payroll. Recruiting one, training one, and covering the shift while the new hire learns the work costs real money. Do it twice and the bill gets ugly. Orders create work. Work creates a staffing need. When workers are hard to find, the firm has a reason to keep the one it has. It is boring. It is also the thing the column skips.
Freedom to manage is a legal condition. It says what a firm may do. Replacement cost is an economic one. It says what a firm will do. Freeman swaps them. The permission is not the reason. The bill is. A full restaurant does not keep its cooks out of virtue. It keeps them because the dinner rush is real, and a bad month can turn the same manager into the bearer of bad news. Business freedom tells a manager what he is allowed to do. Demand tells him how much work he has. Freedom matters. It is not the engine.
Freeman quotes the hope that owners are “free to manage their businesses and so diligent and competent in the task that they never have to announce any layoffs,” and he is glad it is happening. He also quotes Reuters asking, “What would we do without experts?” We use them. We also judge them, and a three-sentence explanation with a checkable channel beats a philosophy with no channel at all. Markets change. A century of failed forecasts does not make today’s figure suspect; it makes yesterday’s forecast embarrassing.
And the politics can be real without the mechanism being proved. An administration can preside over a strong labor market without that result becoming evidence for business freedom, managerial competence, or one governing philosophy. One number is not a health report either. Low layoffs tell you about separations. They do not tell you whether people can find work, whether they can switch to something better, whether wages are keeping up, or whether somebody has quietly stopped looking. A firm can keep every job it has and still be a terrible place to look for one. That is a limit on what the chart can carry. Freeman wants the chart to carry a worldview.
His second move is separate and easier to dismiss. Whatever happened in Mamdani’s office, one departure is one departure. A mayor’s office is not a restaurant that can sell more meals when demand rises; it has legal duties, a public budget, and political choices about staffing. It can hire, fire, reorganize, or leave a vacancy open. A public hospital, a union contract, and a worker cooperative are not synonyms for one-party dictatorship — I concede the catastrophe of twentieth-century communism in the first breath and have no interest in relitigating it — but Freeman needs all of those things to be one thing so that a single municipal vacancy can contaminate every alternative. You cannot stack a joke on a statistic and call the result a finding.
So low layoffs should not make us sentimental about whoever happened to benefit from a tight market. Keeping a job is good. Having power over the terms that protect it is better. Build the two institutions that survive the next bad year.
The first is bargaining before the cut. One negotiation for a whole industry: wages, hours, and conditions set for every firm in the trade. Five hundred restaurants cannot compete by underpaying dishwashers if one agreement sets the dishwasher’s pay for all of them. Several states already run wage boards that do exactly this for tipped restaurant staff, and sector contracts do the same job where workers win them. The point is not the size of the wage. The point is that one boss, with the next applicant waiting outside, no longer sets it alone — and a firm cannot gain by cutting while the same workers care for the same families.
The second is ownership after the cut, when a firm has to shrink. If the workers own the firm, they vote on what shrinking means; they share the losses instead of walking away from them. One member, one vote. Money the business keeps belongs to the members who decide how to use it, and a bank lends to worker-owned firms so the household does not have to carry the whole risk. Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx — worker-owned, roughly two thousand home-care workers — is the version I would point to: the people doing the work decide how it is organized and what happens when there is less of it. Mondragon’s cooperative network shows the design at scale, and when one workplace there failed, the network moved about seventeen hundred of its eighteen hundred member-workers into other co-ops. The business may fail without becoming one mass layoff.
Finally, make unemployment insurance automatic and tie it to retraining, so a family does not need perfect foresight to survive a plant closure. Jobs end. Machines change. Factories close. The risk of economic change should be spread across society instead of dumped on one household.
A wage board. A sector contract. A worker-owned firm. Automatic benefits that arrive without an obstacle course. Something with a name, a budget, and a vote — built so the next time the chart dips, it is not a doctrine anybody is riding, just workers who share the risk instead of carrying it alone.