May’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey has been released, covering data from March. Later today we will get the employment numbers for April. Hopefully we are enough past the shutdowns to get better and more current data and maybe the new Administration has gotten some better methods in place. There were not huge revisions to prior months which is encouraging. In terms of some big picture stuff, the number of job openings remained slightly below the number of unemployed persons, which is supposedly not good, but both the number of openings and the number of unemployed persons are exaggerated. Companies advertise jobs they aren’t going to fill and a lot of “unemployed” persons have no desire to work. The big surprise for the month was a large jump in hires, almost 655,000 for the month. Job openings declined slightly and quits increased by about 125,000.
The big hiring increases month over month were in professional and business services at 165,000; accomodation and food services, 124,000 and transportation, warehousing and utilities, 108,000. Encouragingly, federal government hires continued to decline, as did federal and overall government job openings. Job openings declined significantly in professional and business services, 318,000, which is consistent with the hiring decline in this category, but increased by almost 100,000 in finance and insurance. If you are looking for AI impacts these are categories to watch, but they seem to be telling inconsistent stories.
Manufacturing job openings were up somewhat significantly from a year ago, so maybe the supposed manufacturing boom is beginning to kick in. Retail job openings were also up a good bit from a year ago. We are seeing a trend of more layoffs in business and professional services. Again, a likely early target for AI-related changes. The overall picture is a fairly healthy labor market that is less dependent on government jobs.
