- by New Deal democrat
One piece of data released yesterday that I didn’t report on was the JOLTS labor market report for July. This parses turnover in the market by hires, layoffs, and quits, among other things. It is a minor indicator, but let’s take a look.
The first graph below shows the “soft statistic” of job openings (blue), actual hires (red), and quits (gold), all normed to 100 as of just before the pandemic:
can see that for the past several years the “hard data” of hires and quits have run below their level of 2019. Only openings, which even at the worst level were just barely low their 2019 level, have been increasing again this year. In July actual hires were at their 3rd lowest for the entire post-pandemic period, in accord with the actual jobs losses suggested by last month’s employment report.
Similarly, here is the graph for layoffs:
Layoffs have been running at close to their lowest post-pandemic levels over the past nine months.
In other words, a very low hire and low fire job sector.
Also, a good case has been made that the quits rate (blue, right scale) leads YoY average hourly wages (red):
For the past year, the quits rate has been close to completely flat. That argues that *nominally* average hourly wages YoY should be stabilizing at a 3.4%-3.5% rate.
Much more currently, this morning’s ADP employment number for August (red) showed a slight 44,000 gain in private jobs. I also show the more noisy weekly ADP number (blue) in comparison with the official payrolls number (gold, right scale):
What is interesting is that the ADP numbers more closely track the official QCEW numbers (to which payrolls will be benchmarked) which were finalized for 2025 last week, i.e., slower hiring in the first three quarters of last year, followed by improvement at the end of the year and mild improvement in the first several months of this year.
