While official unemployment remains low, America’s labor market is stagnating: wage growth has slowed, job creation has weakened, and labor force participation is in decline. White-collar employment, particularly in tech, has fallen by 1.9 percent since its peak in 2022. This may sound modest, but previous recessions in 2008 and 2020 began with similar declines. In the tech industry, layoffs are up 36 percent from last year. What began in 2022 as start-up downsizing has since spread to larger, higher-profile companies such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Meta.