Job openings, quits rate stay near record highs despite recession fears
Job openings remained near record highs in July and layoffs stayed low even as the Federal Reserve moved to cool off the labor market, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.
The July Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) report showed the job market powering through rising interest rates meant to ease a labor shortage that is likely driving inflation higher.
U.S. employers had roughly 11.2 million open jobs on the final business day of July, in line with revised figures from June. There are nearly two job openings listed for each one of the 5.7 million Americans who reported being unemployed in July, according to Labor Department data.
Businesses hired roughly 6.4 million new workers in July and lost 5.9 million for a net increase of roughly 500,000 jobs. Of the nearly 6 million Americans who left jobs in July, 4.2 million quit on their own accord, likely to take a job with better compensation or career opportunities elsewhere.
The quits rate, which measures the percentage of the workforce that quit their jobs in a given month, remained at 2.7 percent, just below a record high of 2.9 percent set earlier this year.
The persistence of high job openings and a steep quits rate is a sign of how much power jobseekers continued to have with the size of the workforce still below pre-pandemic levels. Businesses have boosted wages at rapid rates to find and maintain enough staff to keep up with consumer spending, which has risen well above pre-pandemic levels and has fallen only slightly due to inflation.
Roughly 1.4 million Americans were laid off in July, largely unchanged from June’s level, as employers sought to avoid losing scarce workers. While millions of Americans are typically laid off from jobs every year, layoff rates have remained historically low since 2021 as businesses struggle to keep workers from taking higher paying jobs at other firms.
The July JOLTS report is the latest sign of labor market strength amid conditions meant to make it weaker. The U.S. added a stunning 528,000 jobs last month, even after a steep rise in inflation and rapid Fed interest rate hikes that economists expected to slow hiring to a crawl.
While the strength of the labor market shows how far the U.S. may be from falling into a recession, it poses challenges for the Fed as they attempt to bring job openings and wage growth down to a more sustainable level. Rapid wage growth and labor shortages are one of several forces pushing inflation higher, and the Fed has expressed concerns about a potential cycle of price and wage hikes that could make inflation hard to tame.
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Source: TEST FEED1
