- by New Deal democrat
The JOLTS report is low on my list of useful tools, but it does break down the labor market further than the jobs report, and it does have several slightly leading components, so let’s at least take a brief look at this series, which *finally* was updated to its normal last report (for March) on what would be on schedule prior to the government shutdown last autumn.
Below are job openings (blue), hires (red), and quits (gold) through March, all normed to 100 as of the onset of the pandemic:
Job openings seem to get the lion’s share of attention from most commentators, but I treat them as somewhat fictional. In any event, they declined -56,000 to 6.866 million, the lowest since the pandemic, except for last December. On the other hand, both actual hires and quits rebounded in March, by 655,000 and 125,000. In the case of hires, it was the highest reading in two years after its post-pandemic low last month; in the case of quits it was about average for the past year.
Layoffs and discharges, on the other hand, rebounded sharply from their lowest numbers of the past 12 months at the end of last year, up 153,000 to 1.867 million:
This is in stark contrast too the extremely low level of new jobless claims we have seen since November, including a new 50+ year low last week. In this case I put more stock in jobless claims, which are both more timely and much less noisy.
Finally, the quits rate (blue) tends to lead the YoY gain in hourly nonsupervisory wages (red). Here is the post-pandemic close-up:
With quits increasing back to their 2025 average, this counts as good news, since it suggests that YoY wage growth is likely to stabilize. At the same time, I have to caution that wage growth is a lagging indicator, remaining low after recessions until there is a sufficient decline in unemployment, and remaining at expansionary levels until employment has decidly rolled over.
