THERE are now more jobs available —
but unfilled — in the United States than there were before the Great Recession
began at the end of 2007. And employers are firing fewer workers than they did
when times were good. But they are also hiring fewer people.
In a report this week, the Bureau
of Labor Statistics said that employers reported in June that they had 4.5
million available jobs that they were unable to fill. That is the highest number
since 2007, and more than twice as high as the figure in October 2009, when the
economy was officially beginning to recover but there were no signs of that in
the labor market.
That figure was contained in the
monthly Jolts report — Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Until recently,
the survey tended to get relatively little attention. In part, that is because
the survey began in 2000, so there is relatively little history, and in part it
is because the figures are released more than a month after the jobs numbers for
the same month come out, making them seem like old news.
But since Janet L. Yellen, the
chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, began to cite them in her assessment of the
economy, they have received more attention in the hope that they may provide a
hint of when the Fed will begin to raise interest rates.
“The economy seems to be moving
faster toward Yellen’s goal of eliminating slack in the labor market,” said Ed
Yardeni, the chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research, after the Jolts
numbers were released.
The accompanying charts compare
three-month moving averages of seasonally adjusted figures to the averages for
all of 2007. The moving averages are used because the Jolts figures, which are
based on monthly surveys of employers, can be volatile.
On that basis, in June the
three-month average of unfilled job openings was 4.57 million, with June’s
figure at 4.67 million. It was the first time since the recession began that the
three-month figure exceeded the 2007 average of 4.48 million.
The volume of firings soared
during the recession, but now is lower than it was before the downturn. The
number of people quitting has recovered, but it is still well below the earlier
level.
In March, Ms. Yellen noted that
while there were signs of progress, the number of new hires remained
disappointing.
“I take the quit rate in many ways
as a sign of the health of the economy,” she told a news conference. “When
workers are scared they won’t be able to get other jobs, they show a reduced
willingness to quit their jobs. Now, quit rates are below normal prerecession
levels, but on the other hand, they have come up over time, and so we have seen
improvement. The job opening rate has also come up. The hires rate, however,
remains extremely depressed, and I take that as a sign of a weaker labor
market.”
The survey classifies employee
departures in one of three ways, including the two obvious ones of workers who
quit and those who are laid off or discharged. The third, and smallest, group
includes workers who leave for other reasons, principally retirement or death,
but also because of transfers. Because the survey covers individual working
locations — a particular Walmart store, for example — rather than entire
companies, a worker who is transferred from one store to another could be
classified as having left.