Emerging strategic industries serve as a pivotal driver for nations to foster new-quality productive forces and spur new engines of economic growth. This paper treats the construction of emerging strategic industrial clusters as an exogenous shock to investigate its causal effect on labor employment. Employing data on Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2022, the study demonstrates that emerging strategic industrial clusters enhance labor employment by around 4.6%. Enhanced external financial support and knowledge spillover effects constitute the underlying mechanisms driving this employment growth. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the employment-promoting effect of industrial clusters is more pronounced for firms in key industries related to the national economy and for enterprises with substantial financial constraints. After addressing endogeneity concerns through a series of robustness tests, including randomization inference and the Oster test, the baseline findings remain robust. Finally, the paper finds that industrial clusters primarily promote the employment of high-skilled labor. This study clarifies the mechanism through which emerging strategic industrial clusters affect labor employment, providing implications for accelerating the development of new-quality productive forces, safeguarding employment, and enhancing people’s well-being.