Health Care Just Became the U.S.'s Largest Employer
In the American labor market, services are the new steel.
This moment was inevitable. It just wasn’t supposed to happen so soon.
Due to the inexorable aging of the country—and equally unstoppable growth in medical spending—it was long obvious that health-care jobs would slowly take up more and more of the economy. But in the last quarter, for the first time in history, health care has surpassed manufacturing and retail, the most significant job engines of the 20th century, to become the largest source of jobs in the U.S.
In 2000, there were 7 million more workers in manufacturing than
