Job openings little changed at 5.4 million in October

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Economic News Release USDL-15-2328

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary

For release 10:00 a.m. (EST) Tuesday, December 8, 2015 USDL-15-2328

Technical information: [phone] • [e-mail] • www.bls.gov/jlt
Media contact: [phone] • [e-mail]

JOB OPENINGS AND LABOR TURNOVER – OCTOBER 2015

The number of job openings was little changed at 5.4 million on the last business day of October, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Hires and separations were little changed at 5.1 million and 4.9 million, respectively. Within separations, the quits rate was 1.9 percent for the seventh consecutive month, and the layoffs and discharges rate was 1.2 percent. This release includes estimates of the number and rate of job openings, hires, and separations for the nonfarm sector by industry and by four geographic regions.

Job Openings

Job openings were little changed at 5.4 million in October. The job openings rate was 3.6 percent. The number of job openings was little changed in October for total private and government. Job openings decreased in professional and business services (-137,000) and in the West region (-132,000). (See table 1.)

The number of job openings (not seasonally adjusted) increased over the 12 months ending in October for total nonfarm, total private, and government. Job openings rose over the year in health care and social assistance (+225,000), retail trade (+141,000), state and local government (+51,000), and federal government (+15,000). Job openings decreased over the year in finance and insurance (-55,000) and mining and logging (-17,000). The number of job openings increased over the year in 3 out of the 4 regions—Northeast, South, and Midwest—and was little changed in the West. (See table 7.)

Hires

The number of hires was 5.1 million in October, little changed from September. The hires rate was 3.6 percent. The number of hires was little changed for total private and government in October. There was little change in the number of hires in all industries while hires increased in the West region over the month. (See table 2.)
....

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The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey results for November 2015 are scheduled to be released on Tuesday, January 12, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. (EST).

Read more: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

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I didn't think this would be released until tomorrow. I'm lucky I checked the MarketWatch Economic Calendar.

Edited at 4:23., after whatthehey had posted:

11:45 am ET
Dec 8, 2015
Economy

Hiring, Firing and Quitting Have Finally Gotten Close to Where Janet Yellen Wants Them

By Josh Zumbrun
[e-mail]
@JoshZumbrun

In March 2013, then-Federal Reserve Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen said she was going to be closely monitoring the labor market’s churn—the millions of monthly hirings and firings and quits and retirements that underlie the net job gains reported by the Labor Department each month. Slowly but surely, the three indicators have improved the way now-Chairwoman Yellen hoped. Layoffs have not risen, the rate of hiring has accelerated, and the share of people voluntarily quitting has climbed, according to an update today from the Labor Department’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as Jolts. The progress of the labor market along these dimensions underscores the central bank’s confidence that the economy is finally healthy enough for the Fed to raise its target interest rate for the first time in nearly a decade.



In March of 2013, about 2.1 million workers quit their jobs, a rate of about 1.5%. Those numbers have improved slowly enough that the improvement is hard to notice from one month to the next (in this month’s report, all the key measures were “little changed”). But over the course of the past two and a half years, the improvement has been considerable. In October, 2.8 million people quit their jobs, a rate of 1.9%—roughly the same as in December 2007, the month the economy began to decline into recession. Ms. Yellen had said in her speech “a pickup in the quit rate, which also remains at a low level, would signal that workers perceive that their chances to be rehired are good–in other words, that labor demand has strengthened.” Put another way, just under half of the people who left a job in March 2013 did so voluntarily. The majority of job separations were still involuntary layoffs or departures due to retirement, death or disability. Among people who left a job in October, by contrast, 57% did so voluntarily.



Layoffs, on the other hand, have remained persistently low: There were 1.8 million layoffs in March 2013 and 1.7 million in October 2015. The rate of layoffs has held steady between 1.1% and 1.3%. The layoff rate skyrockets during recessions, but falls as the economy improves. A layoff rate of 1.1% is the lowest in the history of the series. In her remarks, Ms. Yellen had said “layoffs and discharges as a share of total employment have already returned to their prerecession level, while the hiring rate remains depressed. Therefore, going forward, I would look for an increase in the rate of hiring.” Since then, the monthly pace of hiring has climbed to 5.1 million from 4.3 million. The level and rate of hiring is almost exactly where it was in December 2007. That’s not to say all has been well with the economy—the pace of recovery has been grindingly slow at a time when millions of unemployed workers were desperate. And there are still puzzles in this data. The monthly level of job openings has risen to record highs. Hiring has recovered much more slowly, a sign that something is not quite right: Employers are just not filling all of their available jobs. But over two and a half grinding years, the metrics Ms. Yellen has been watching have, slowly but significantly, improved.
....

[whatthehey]

1. These data aren't all that interesting but deserve more attention

Why? Because whenever job announcements are made, I see two overwhelming issues with the majority of responses.

1) People don't understand the metric, how it's derived, and what it's for

2) Few folks understand the scope and churn within the US labor market

This report doesn't help point 1 much except in being easy to understand in and of itself, but it's a huge impact on point 2. It's so easy to get overwhelmed with 10,000 layoffs here or 275,000 initial claims this week, and just human nature to compare those numbers to our own narrow circle, our own employer, even our own town, and consider them to be huge systemic movements of national importance in the labor market.

But if people would only absorb that there are about 150 million employees in the US, and that it's been the norm for quite some time for 5 million of them give or take to lose or leave a job AND 5 million of them give or take to start a new one each and every month, it would surely bring a welcome perspective to hyperbolic responses to whatever factory layoff hit the news today. I've been part of a couple or more of those. They are not easy or fun on an individual or local basis for sure, but they are also rounding errors in the massive churn seen in the overall US labor market. More people should absorb this.