The rate of layoffs dipped to a new record low in September, which would be good news but for one thing: The rate of hiring is also down.
Compared with August, layoffs decreased in health care, arts and entertainment, government, and mining and logging, according to the Labor Department’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as Jolts.
The Jolts report is the Labor Department’s second-tier report on the job market. Its regular monthly jobs report, released on Friday, showed the country added a net 161,000 jobs in October. The Jolts report estimates how much hiring, firing, quitting and other job separations were behind that number.
The layoff rate skyrocketed during the recession in 2007 to 2009, but declined over the course of 2010 and has hovered at unusually low levels for the past five years: The rate first reached its previous record low of 1.1% in 2013. In September, the rate was 1%.
Weekly reports on the number of Americans filing initial jobless claims also show layoffs have become less common in the U.S. economy, overall, than they used to be.
When Americans do leave a job, it’s overwhelmingly classified as a voluntary separation. Of course, some people quit jobs out of frustration or are pushed out. But on the whole, an increasing level of quits reflects labor market health.
What otherwise would be a welcome trend is tempered by the fact that the hiring rate has also been weak. The rate at which Americans are hired into new jobs never fully returned to the pace reached before the last recession in 2005 or 2006. Going back to the tail end of the 1990s, the hiring rate was nearly a full percentage point higher than it is today.
The hiring rate declined in this months’ report and has dipped from 3.8% in February to 3.5% in September.
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