Energy News Beat
People quit quitting, so fewer job openings to fill, fewer people to hire, less churn. Good for employers, not so good for workers. Layoffs & discharges dropped below Good-Times lows.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Job openings edged down in November, but remained relatively high, workers quit quitting maybe because they’re worried about their jobs, and with voluntary quitting back to normal, the churn in the workforce at companies is also back to normal: with fewer people quitting, there are fewer vacant slots that need to be filled, so fewer job openings and fewer hires. Layoffs and discharges fell sharply in November and are well below the Good-Times lows before the pandemic. A labor market that isn’t quite back to normal yet, but is getting there, as the pandemic-era churn that had shifted power from employers to workers is subsiding.
Job openings dipped by 62,000 in November from October, after the drop of 498,000 in the prior month, to 8.79 million openings, the lowest since March 2021. Openings were still 27% higher than in November 2019, according to data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today as part of its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), based on a large survey of employers and not on internet job postings.
The three-month moving average, which irons out the month-to-month ups and downs and shows the trend, fell by 236,000 in November, after having stabilized in the prior three months:
People quit quitting. The layoff headlines since mid-2022 scared workers into hanging on to their jobs, and fewer of them went chasing after the greener grass on the other side of the fence. There is a lot of anecdotal reporting about workers who don’t want to return to the office biting the bullet and returning to the office at least a few days a week, rather than quitting to find a remote job.
Voluntary quits fell by 157,000 to 3.47 million, after having stabilized over the prior four months. The three-month moving average (3MMA) fell by 64,000 to 3.58 million. Quits are now back in the range where they had been during the Good Times before the pandemic.
Fewer quits translates into fewer newly vacant slots – so fewer job openings – and employers have to hire fewer people to fill those job openings – so fewer hires – and it means less churn and a more stable workforce, and that’s good for employers, but not so good for workers. It’s a sign that power in the labor market has shifted from workers back to employers.
Layoffs and discharges dropped by 116,000 in November to 1.53 million, and are in a historically very low range.
Businesses across the US fire workers for a variety of reasons all the time. When discharges are done for economic reasons, they’re “layoffs,” and when they’re done for other reasons, such as performance, they’re “discharges.” During the Good Times in 2014-2019, layoffs and discharges averaged 1.8 million per month. That was just part of a normal labor market. During the Great Recession, at the peak, layoffs and discharges exceeded 2.5 million a month. In March 2020, they exceeded 13 million.
The three-month moving average dropped by 52,000 to 1.59 million, well below the low points in the years before the pandemic:
New hires… With fewer people quitting and fewer people getting fired or laid off, there were fewer vacant slots to fill, and so hires dropped further. Hires in November fell by 363,000 to 5.46 million.
The three-month moving average fell by 128,000 to 5.73 million, in the middle of the range of 2018 and 2019.
This is another sign that the incredible churn in the labor market during the pandemic has subsided and that demand for labor has returned to normal-ish levels, and that workers no longer enjoy the power they used to have a couple of years ago.
But job openings vary widely by industry, surging to a record in construction, dropping in most other sectors, and plunging in information (a sector that encompasses many tech and social media companies). We will post this by-industry detail shortly, stay tuned.
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The post More Signs that Power in the Labor Market Has Shifted from Workers back to Employers appeared first on Energy News Beat.
