Job openings fell in the US last month, but not by as much as economists collectively forecast.
That’s according to Tuesday’s JOLTS release, the first of several labor market appetizers served ahead of Friday’s main macro course, the July jobs report.
There were 8.184 million open positions across the world’s largest economy on the last business day of June, the BLS said. That was 46,000 fewer versus an upwardly-revised 8.230 million on the last day of May. Consensus expected 8 million (on the nose) from the JOLTS headline.
Hires, meanwhile, fell 314,000, the largest month-to-month drop since February of 2023, pushing the gap between the two series to the widest in four months.
Do note: Hires slipped below levels observed in and around the last negative NFP headline. So, hires were the lowest since the pandemic jobs purge in April of 2020.
I don’t know how much — if any — coverage the hires print will get on Tuesday, but I’d be remiss not to point out the veritable plunge in accommodation and food services hiring.
As the figure below shows, hires in that all-important sector fell off a map over the past two months, and were lower in June even than December of 2020, when the leisure and hospitality industry was waylaid by a vicious winter COVID wave.
Openings for those jobs rose, though, and stood at 866,000 as of June 30.
Total layoffs and discharges dropped to the lowest since November of 2022, Tuesday’s report showed. The separation rate, at 0.9, matched a record low.
Quits fell to 3.282 million, the lowest since November of 2020 and, notably, lower than every print from March of 2018 up to the eve of the pandemic.
The quit rate was unchanged at 2.1%, the lowest since August of 2020.
Finally, the job openings to unemployed ratio fell to 1.20, the lowest in three years.
All in all, the JOLTS release continued to suggest the US labor market’s holding up, even as it softens, re-balances and otherwise normalizes. As a researcher at Indeed quoted by Bloomberg put it, we’re in a “‘limited hiring, limited firing'” conjuncture.
My guess is the Fed will read Tuesday’s update as constructive, even if it might’ve hinted, however subtly, at a hiring slowdown.
Low turnover is bad for laid off and new entrants. The numbers present a mixed bag though, the trend is still towards slower growth.
Sorry, standing by my belief, based solely on circumstantial evidence but on a staggering abundance of it, that the unemployment numbers are fiction. Some sort of revision is going to come out and avid HR comments section readers are going to say, “hey, that out-of-work software engineer who kept bitching in the comment sections about an employment recession that nobody else knew about… he was actually right!” I’m completely open to admitting when I don’t know much about some thing, but I’m sure of that.
I believe it’s that the Sec 174 tax changes hit much harder than anybody wants to admit yet… least of all the Democrats, who could use it as an incredibly effective argument against Trump, except it would mean admitting that they’ve been lying for three years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/1ci4g1k/welcome_to_the_whitecollar_recession/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/18/software-firms-face-huge-tax-bills-that-threaten-tech-startup-survival.html
“ Across the software development field, founders are experiencing an income tax season that has become an existential threat to their company’s survival. Software startups say they were blindsided by shocking tax bills as a result of a change in law related to research and development costs, and if Congress does not provide a retroactive fix, business failures will spread throughout the industry.”
And indeed, Congress did not provide that fix, and indeed, the failure spread, from the IT department to the HR department to the marketing department, and further outwards, to where professionals have been out of work for up to two years, lost their homes, and in some cases now, I’m sad to start seeing recently, their lives. I cannot believe that those will not knock additional dominoes down. And still, nobody other than an isolated business article here and there will talk about it.
Remember in a year or two that I said this. And if I turn out by that time to be wrong, I’ll admit it. I doubt I am.