On August 1, President Donald Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The cause for discipline was a less-than-optimistic jobs report that Trump claimed was “rigged.” The report was based on actual statistics using the methodology the BLS has employed since its inception regardless of who occupied the White House.

If the president hoped that getting rid of McEntarfer would yield a more positive jobs report a month later, he was dead wrong. Firing the messenger didn’t solve the economic crisis of capitalism.

According to the BLS, only 22,000 new jobs were created in August, fewer than the 73,000 created in July. Thus there are not enough jobs for new workers entering the workforce. 

The official unemployment rate showed little change, edging up slightly to 4.3% — 7.4 million people — since McEntarfer’s retaliatory firing. Another 4.7 million people are underemployed — wanting a full time job but only working part time.

There are an additional 6.4 million people “not in the labor force who wanted a job” because they were not actively looking for work in the four weeks covered in the August survey. (bls.gov, Sept. 5)

In other words, there are officially at least 18.5 million people and their families impacted by unemployment! That’s a crisis!

Additional statistics released on Sept. 9 don’t make the economic picture any prettier. That day the “revised” numbers for March 2024 through March 2025 showed that 911,000 fewer jobs were added than the number in previous monthly   figures — half as many as originally reported. (nytimes.com, Sept. 9) There is no economic boom.

No, Trump can’t “fix” the facts — he is actually contributing to them. Among the unemployed are the federal workers Trump had fired in the name of “efficiency.” His policies are hitting workers of color particularly hard; the laid-off federal workers who lost jobs include 300,000 Black women.

More workers are losing jobs because of Trump’s tariffs; there was a drop of 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August.

Trump’s policies only one factor driving economic crisis 

There’s more involved in understanding the economic crisis facing workers and oppressed people. This economic downturn, as with every single economic downturn that preceded it, going back centuries, is inevitable under the capitalist mode of production. 

As Karl Marx explained in the 19th century, crises of overproduction are driven by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: Production is social, but ownership of the means of production is private. Individual capitalists are in competition with one another to decrease the cost of production by driving down the cost of labor power by cutting wages and shrinking the workforce.  

This leads to periodic cycles of boom and bust, a bust occurring when the capitalist class cannot sell the goods that the working class produces. So workers get the axe. Then, when millions of people are unemployed, they form a “reserve army of labor.” 

The supply of labor power is greater than the demand for it. When workers are desperate for work, the bosses take advantage of the situation. They drive down the price of labor power — wages — impoverishing employed workers and increasing the ranks of the “working poor.” 

In 2023, there were officially 36.8 million people living in poverty. (Census.gov, Sept. 10, 2024) A disproportionate number were people of color and women.

What’s different now is that, beyond the classic ups and downs in the economy, capitalism is now in its late or end stage, sometimes called “capitalism at a dead end.” 

So there are policy-related layoffs, on top of a cyclical crisis, on top of a basic failure to meet human needs under end-stage capitalism.

Capitalism has nothing to offer the working class but more unemployment, a rising cost of living and falling wages.

The historic task of the workers is the same as it was in Marx’s day: Overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation. Replace it with socialism, a system that puts human needs first.