After three consecutive months of declines, job openings jumped in April, reaching 10.1 million, the Labor Department reported yesterday, the New York Times reported. The surge signals that job opportunities are withstanding the economic pressures that have led many to believe that the American economy may soon enter a recession. At the same time, the report — known as JOLTS, or the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — showed that the labor market was far less feverish than it was a year earlier. The quits rate — viewed as an indicator of how confident workers are in leaving a job and finding employment elsewhere — was 3 percent, seasonally adjusted, in April 2022. Since then, it has retreated to 2.4 percent, just above its prepandemic peak. And the hiring rate was unchanged from March, which was the lowest since December 2020. Layoffs, however, decreased again, showing that employers are hesitant to let go of employees brought on board during this recovery. The statistical relationship between high job vacancies, as calculated by the government, and low unemployment has been frequently cited by the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, as a key sign of the labor market’s being “unsustainably hot” and “clearly out of balance, with demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of available workers.” But even as some economists remain unsatisfied with the progress on subduing prices, others worry that reliance on job openings as a core measure of labor market balance may lead the Fed to keep the cost of borrowing for businesses and households too high for too long, prompting a harsher downturn than necessary.
