The Workers Least Likely to Lose Jobs Now Struggle to Find Them

Job-finding rates, the share of unemployed workers who land a new job within a month, have fallen further for America's most reliably employed workers than for any other group in the labor market, according to a new Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond analysis. The old rule, that people who always have a job can always find one, no longer holds.

'Primary workers,' about 55% of the US labor pool, are 'almost always employed,' per the analysis. They have steady work histories and usually appear in unemployment statistics only when something has gone wrong. Historically, they had the best odds of finding a new job. Between a November 2022 high and a September 2025 low, their job-finding rate dropped 13 percentage points, the steepest decline for any category the study covered.

Secondary workers, roughly 14% of the labor pool, are often out of work or cycling between jobs. They account for most of measured unemployment, and their job-finding rate is lower in absolute terms. Over the same window, that rate fell two percentage points, a fraction of the primary worker decline. The gap between the groups has narrowed.

This pattern is new. In past major recessions, primary workers saw the biggest job-finding declines, followed by secondary workers. This time the most attached group took the larger decline, and less attached workers barely moved. The report flags the timing as a puzzle: the US economy was growing through most of the period.