National employment trends sometimes look a bit different at the local level. LPM News’ Bill Burton spoke with Michael Gritton, of KentuckianaWorks, to drill into how the federal shutdown affected data, employment rates for young people in Louisville and more.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Bill Burton: The national jobs report showed 64,000 jobs were added in November, but 105,000 jobs were lost in October. What are we seeing locally?
Michael Gritton: What we're seeing locally is we only have data through September because of the federal shutdown. But across the region, we've added about 5.000 jobs from September of 2024 to September of 2025. So slow, incremental growth, which is better than the alternative. And the unemployment rate is still very low for the region, roughly 4%.
BB: You mentioned the shutdown that lasted 43 days. Clearly, you're seeing a major effect. If your numbers are only through September, how much longer are you expecting to feel these effects?
MG: I think we're not going to have really good data again at the local and regional level until January, February, March. It just takes a while to get that apparatus back up. So the national data is a little bit better, but remember, in order to have survey sizes and sample sizes to be big enough for you to be able to say things about the local level, it's likely to be January, February before we'll have it for sure.
BB: You say there's a slight uptick locally. For jobs nationally, we're seeing a slight downturn. Is there a specific group of people that's being affected more than others?
MG: In the data, the unemployment rate for young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 is higher than it's been in the last four or five years. It's up around 10%. The good news is young people are looking for work, which is great, but many of them are struggling to find a job, which is not great, and that typically has affected high school educated kids. But what we're also seeing in the data, and you're reading national stories about it, and hearing it on NPR, there's a slowdown for college educated young people, too. Nobody knows for sure how much of that is AI, how much of that is tariffs, how much of that is just a general slowing down.
Remember, when the Fed raises interest rates, they're trying to slow things down. They think they're in a car, and the car is heading slightly downhill and it's going a little too fast. They're trying to tap on the brakes without slamming on the brakes and it's a very tricky balance to get right. So far, they seem to be mostly getting it right. But as that slowdown is slowing things, young people in particular, are the ones that are struggling. Again at KentuckianaWorks, we fund programs, we do things that help young people, summer jobs, like summer works and a program with Goodwill called The Spot for young adults. We do what we can to try to help those young people plug in. But that's the data, and that's the real challenge at the moment.
BB: With 2026 right around the corner, what are you seeing for the early months of the year locally?
MG: The good news is GE appliances is making major investments. Ford Motor company’s making major investments in the Louisville assembly plant where my dad works. Those things are good. But you also see in the broader region, the BlueOval layoffs and the reordering of the partnership between Ford and SK. We'll have to see how that's going to work. There have been huge changes in that market in the last three years, so we'll have to see what happens there.
In general, it feels like it's steady at the moment. That's what the data seems to be showing us, that they're getting it about right. They've slowed things down, but not so much that we're seeing big layoffs. I will say we have had a couple of layoffs in the region in the last two or three months, one in Shelby County, one in Bullitt County. I hope we don't get more of that. These sort of big things where you see 200 or 300 people at a time, and obviously the BlueOval thing is affecting a couple thousand, which is huge.
