Hey, its time for another Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. What mysterious changes will be revealed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this time, as the survey response rate continues to shrink. The headlines were incredibly positive; job openings (more is supposedly better) rose an extremely strong 330,000 in September and that was from August numbers that were revised up by 110,000. There were some significant increases in openings in a few industries, unfortunately led by state and local governments supposedly looking for over 100,000 new workers. Professional and business services and information services had good increases, which doesn’t fit with the bogus narrative that AI would cause job losses. Trade and transportation, construction and manufacturing all saw openings rise. Several sectors had relatively small declines in openings in September.
Hires were essentially unchanged in almost every industry segment, but overall were strong, the highest in a while. Leisure and hospitality had over 150,000 hires but also over 150,000 quits. Separations, voluntary and involuntary, also saw little change in most segments, but quits increased overall at a good pace, which supposedly shows confidence among employees that they will easily find another job. There are obvious relationships among categories. You would think if there are more openings there should be more hires and if there are more quits there might be more openings and hiring. Involuntary “separations”, i.e., fired people or layoffs should be watched closely but has shown no signs of big increases over the last year despite some announcements of supposedly large job cuts. (BLS Report)
If you trust the numbers, which might be reckless given frequent revisions, it appears that the gap between the number of job openings and unemployed people has widened, also supposedly a positive for the overall labor market. The big picture over the last year is a pretty stable labor market, despite all the AI fears and the tariff fears and the Iran conflict. The economy must be chugging along at a good pace for this to be true and the GDP numbers released last week support that idea. Things are going a lot better than people are led to believe by the media.
