New job openings nationally have decreased to their lowest level since the winter of 2021, according to a just-released report issued by the Department of Labor.
As of the end of July there were just over 7.7 million job vacancies, a drop from 7.9 million the month before.
As reported in the Labor Department’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, separations, which include those who have quit a job or been laid off, jumped from 5.1 million to 5.4 million.
Those quits, asserts the New York Post, are seen as a “measure of the job market’s health: Workers typically quit when they already have a new job or when they’re confident they can find one.”
Even so, the job openings trendline, notes the Financial Times, has been generally heading downward from a “2022 peak as the labor market has slowed, dropping 13% over the past year.”
The upshot, reports the site MarketWatch, is that conditions are “returning to pre-pandemic levels,” yet one more sign that the “labor market has softened and that people can’t find work as easily.”
Put another way, continues MarketWatch, “Fewer industries are hiring, and jobs have become harder to find.”
The job openings numbers remained largely static for some two years heading into the Covid 19 outbreak of early 2020. At that point there was a slight dip, while the nation’s unemployment level went from around 3% to a historic nearly 15%.
As the nation moved into a pandemic recovery period in 2021, the unemployment rate swiftly dropped to around 5%, while the job vacancies rate increased to several percentage points above that.
The two trends have seen a near nexus this year, with unemployment at around 4.5%.
According to the Labor Department report, job openings were off in the healthcare and social assistance sector by around 187,000; professional and business services by 178,000; state and local government, by just over 101,000; and the transportation, warehousing and utilities sectors by some 88,000.
By Garry Boulard
