- by New Deal democrat
This morning’s JOLTS labor market report for September, which parses labor market turnover by hires, layoffs, and quits, among other things, continued the string of positive trends in this sector this year, as all four major components moved in a good direction.
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:
Both hires and quits have had a sideways trend for the past two years. As noted above, in September all of these improved. Hires increased 131,000 to 5.402 million, and were up 3.4% YoY. Quits increased 321,000 to 3.365 million and were up 4.9% YoY. The “soft” metric of openings, which has had a slightly increasing trend this year, and outside of recessions for the past 25 years, increased 343,000 to 7.523 million, and were up 4.9% YoY. Nevertheless, both hires and quits remain below their pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
Here is the same graph for layoffs, which declined -127,000 to 1.641 million, and were down -9.6% YoY:
Layoffs have been running at close to their lowest post-pandemic levels over the past ten months, and their declining trend since late last year is of a piece with what we have been seeing in the very low level of initial and continuing jobless claims each week.
Let’s also update the comparison of the quits rate (blue, right scale), which has been suggested to lead YoY average hourly wages (red, left scale):
Like the number of hires and quits, 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.
Last month I concluded that “the general takeaway from this report is a jobs sector that has normalized in a low hire, low fire trend.” This month I can add that the trend, like other reports from the labor market, has been improving.
