The Job Market Is Frozen
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-job-market-is-frozen/ar-AA1zPrFg
Unemployment is low, but workers aren’t quitting and businesses aren’t hiring. What’s going on?
Roge Karma notes:
The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard?
The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “I don’t want to say this kind of thing has never happened,” Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. “But I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.” Call it the Big Freeze.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-job-market-is-frozen/ar-AA1zPrFg
Unemployment is low, but workers aren’t quitting and businesses aren’t hiring. What’s going on?
The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard?
The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “I don’t want to say this kind of thing has never happened,” Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. “But I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.” Call it the Big Freeze.