How the Iranian War Economy Is Killing American Hiring in Sectors Nobody Expected

Now, in late March, when the soil should be turning over and the seed suppliers should be busy, drive through the flatlands of central Illinois and something doesn’t seem right. The apparatus is present. There are farmers. However, the planning discussions—the ones that decide how many acres are planted and who is hired to plant them—are taking longer than normal and with much less assurance. Because a significant portion of the world’s urea and ammonia are transported through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently functionally closed, fertilizer prices have increased by about 25% since the bombs began to fall on Tehran in late February. This result was not ordered by anyone. It came as a result.

The traditional narrative about war and employment goes something like this: military recruitment increases, defense contractors grow, and everyone else waits for things to settle. That narrative is neat, well-known, and, in this instance, significantly lacking. With no clear way out, the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, which is now in its fifth week, has caused economic disruptions in industries that most people would never associate with a Persian Gulf conflict. farming. driving a truck. production of semiconductors. supply chains for restaurants. Input costs, hiring freezes, and the covert postponement of expansion plans that had been in the works for months are the disruptions that aren’t making headlines.

The Strait of Hormuz is the mechanism. About 20% of the world’s oil and gas supply passes through that roughly 35-mile-wide channel, which Iran has effectively weaponized. With drone attacks on tankers, the real threat of sea mines, and selective passage for ships connected to Chinese buyers, Tehran has discovered its most potent lever and is using it forcefully. By mid-March, Brent crude, which was trading at about $72 per barrel on February 27th, had risen above $106. This move immediately affects the price of diesel, jet fuel, heating bills, and all other industries where energy is a primary input. The majority of industries are like that.

The fertilizer story is the one that needs more attention than it currently receives. A significant amount of nitrogen-based fertilizer components, particularly urea and ammonia, are produced in the Gulf region and transported to the rest of the world via the Strait of Hormuz. Just as American farmers are attempting to finalize their spring planting plans, prices have skyrocketed due to the strait disruption. The farm workers who would typically be hired for planting season are waiting for input cost clarity, which is not happening, in a state of suspended animation. Some of those acres might just not be planted this year, or they might be planted with less fertilizer-intensive, lower-value crops. For jobs in rural areas, neither result is favorable.

Then there is the sulfur situation, which may seem mysterious until you understand what sulfur really does. The Strait of Hormuz handles about half of the sulfur that is traded worldwide. One element used in the production of semiconductors is sulfur. Precision-guided munitions manufacturing is affected. It is employed in military equipment repairs. The supply chain for the materials required to meet the demand for American defense production is under threat from the same war. According to The Hill, chip manufacturing, an industry that had just started to regain stability after years of supply chain chaos, is being disrupted by the helium supply passing through the same choked geography. After a cautious resumption in late 2025, hiring in the semiconductor industry is currently on hold once more as procurement managers attempt to predict their input costs for Q3.

It’s difficult to ignore how these second-order effects are affecting segments of the American labor force that aren’t usually discussed in relation to foreign policy. The Strait of Hormuz is not on the mind of the truck driver transporting agricultural inputs across Nebraska. Iranian drone attack patterns are not being tracked by the Cincinnati restaurant equipment supplier that is facing a diesel surcharge from their distributor. However, the link is genuine and direct, extending from a small Persian Gulf body of water directly through the supply chains of everyday American economic life. According to Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics, lower-income households—those who spend the largest portion of their income on food and fuel—will essentially lose out on the income gains from recent tax cuts as gas prices rise to about $4.20 per gallon.

Even before the first bomb went off, the hiring picture was unstable. In February 2026, the U.S. economy lost 92,000 payroll jobs. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom had previously described the labor market as a “job-hugging” environment, where employers were reluctant to open new positions and workers were reluctant to leave existing ones. The business community, which was already dealing with tariff shocks and geopolitical tension from the previous year, now faces a new kind of uncertainty due to the war. According to Moody’s Analytics, the likelihood of a recession is 49%. Goldman Sachs lowered its estimate for GDP growth in 2026. Oxford Economics forecasters predict that oil prices won’t return to their pre-war trajectory until 2028. If this prediction is correct, American companies in energy-sensitive industries will have to make three-year hiring decisions in the face of persistent uncertainty.

Observing Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg reporters attempt to find nonexistent off-ramps gives the impression that the business community has taken longer than usual to realize how long this could actually last. Businesses may be preparing for the wrong war entirely if they built their hiring plans for 2026 around a speedy resolution—a few weeks, a few targeted strikes, a deal. According to numerous accounts from analysts at the University of Chicago and the Institute for National Security Studies, the Iranian regime has discovered that economic attrition, as opposed to military victory, is its most successful tactic. Energy markets, input costs, and hiring managers’ shaky confidence in their ability to determine whether now is a good time to hire someone are all under pressure every day the strait remains functionally closed. For many of them, the same response keeps coming up. Not just yet.