A low-hire, low-fire labor market is making job hunting harder - cleveland.com

Ah, marvellous. The US labour market has apparently discovered the economic equivalent of a coma: a 'low-hire, low-fire' environment in which nobody is quite brave enough to hire, but nobody is quite heartless enough to fire either. The result, as cleveland.com helpfully explains with the kind of news you can set your watch to, is that finding a job has become harder — which is like announcing that water is wet and also increasingly expensive. Hiring managers are presumably sitting in endless meetings asking whether the AI will eventually do the job for free, and deciding that doing nothing is the only risk-free strategy. This is not a labour market; it is a waiting room.

And what of the doomers? Oh, they are doing magnificently, thank you. They have been promised a glorious white-collar apocalypse where AI eats every spreadsheet and PowerPoint in existence, and yet the data — that awkward, uncooperative thing — shows that mass displacement has yet to show up. The robots have not come for the accountants; they have merely made the accountants' employers too timid to hire a second one. Somewhere, a chatbot is presumably claiming credit for a productivity gain that no one can measure, while a recruiter quietly ghosts another candidate.

The real joke is that the AI-driven job apocalypse is not coming as a dramatic cull but as a slow, bureaucratic suffocation. Employers are using the mere existence of artificial intelligence as an excuse to keep headcount frozen, and the working class can enjoy the unique pleasure of being neither hired nor fired, just permanently 'under consideration.' The doomers promised us robot overlords; instead we got a standstill. Cheers, then, to the most dystopian outcome of all: a stable, boring, low-fire labour market where the only thing being automated is hope itself.