People are curious to see what the job market is doing with so much economic chaos. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey provides a sense of this, although it is survey based and the response rate isn’t great. Although a different report is used to calculate the number of unemployed people, a comparison between that number and the number of job openings from this one gives a sense of the overall economy–more openings than unemployed persons is a sign of a strong labor market. Right now that ratio is about 1.1 and shrinking, not great but not an indicator of extreme stress.
The report covering January had a bit of an upside surprise in number of job openings and in this report that number was revised up slightly, but for February there was a decline to 7.57 million openings. This is down about 875,000 from a year ago. Big changes by industry were a decline of 163,000 in trade/transportation/utilities, down 80,000 in finance and insurance, down 61,000 in leisure and hospitality and up 134,000 in business and professional services. Somewhat bizarrely, the number of federal job openings increased, which seems weird, because separations wasn’t up much.
The number of hires increased according to this report–we will get a fuller employment picture in that report on Friday. And the number of people quitting jobs voluntarily increased slightly, a supposed sign of ease in finding another job. (BLS Report)
