Couple follow-up charts to this, as I continue to dig through the data. (I'm still working through all this, so no big conclusions/takeaways here -- mostly just datapoints and a few observations.)
First, the surge in job-switching is heavily concentrated among younger workers. Among older workers, switching is still below prepandemic levels. Among prime-age (25-54), it's above, but not by that much. But job-to-job transitions are WAY up for workers under 25.
Before you start complaining about "job-hopping Gen-Zers," though, note that: a) job turnover is *always* highest among younger workers, and b) young workers, prepandemic, were changing jobs *less* often than prior generations.
cc @graykimbrough
If we cut job turnover by occupation, we see a similar pattern to the educational chart I tweeted yesterday, but a bit less dramatic. The surge in job-switching is concentrated among front-line workers. It's up among office workers too, but not by nearly as much.
Note that I'm collapsing already-broad occupational categories ("sales" for example includes both cashiers and real estate brokers) into even broader groupings. So that may be obscuring larger differences beneath the surface.
The CPS sample size really isn't big enough to drill down on specific occupations/industries, at least on a monthly basis. But we can see in JOLTS that there was a big spike in quits in accommodation and food service in September.
Turning back to CPS, and aggregating across three months to beef up our sample, we can see the shift clearly, but it's not that dramatic -- even in this high-turnover industry, most workers stay in their jobs each month.
But CPS can help answer the "where are they going?" question. We aren't seeing a wave of people hopping between restaurant jobs looking for better pay. Nor are we seeing people ditching the industry for greener pastures. The big increase has been people leaving work entirely.
Same story if we focus on front-line food-service workers (coded by occupation rather than by industry): Significant but modest increase in turnover, with most of the action in people leaving work, not taking new jobs.
Some caveats here: These charts include involuntary exits, not just quits (though layoffs are low right now). We also can't tell if people have other jobs lined up and are just taking some time off in between.
These numbers are also just generally noisy, so approach with caution.
Taken at face value, though, these numbers seem consistent with anecdotes of service workers quitting jobs out of frustration with working conditions (maybe including Covid safety). Perhaps aided by savings and the knowledge they can get another job when they need one. \fin
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I hate that @ellawinthrop is leaving us, but I'm so glad I got to work with her on her last piece for @nytimesbusiness. She's the best, most collaborative, most creative visual journalist I've ever worked with. A thread with a few of my favorite Ben-and-Ella collabs:
Good news on inflation! U.S. consumer prices FELL 0.1 percent in June, and were up just 3 percent from a year earlier. "Core" prices, stripping out volatile food and fuel, were up 0.1 percent from May and 3.3 percent from last June. Data: …Live coverage: bls.gov/news.release/c… nytimes.com/live/2024/07/1…
This is the second straight month where there has been effectively no inflation on a month-to-month basis. Prices were flat in May, and down in June.
If you take a longer view here: At 3% year-over-year, inflation is no longer outside historical norms (though it is still higher than immediately prepandemic). And over the past three months, rents have risen at an annual rate of ***just 1.1%.***
Job openings ticked up in May (but only because April was revised down). Layoffs edged up. Quits basically flat. All consistent with a gradually slowing, but not collapsing, job market. #JOLTS
Full data: bls.gov/news.release/j…
There were 8.1 million job openings on the last day of May. That's up from 7.9 million in April, revised down from the 8.1m originally reported.
Larger story here is that openings are clearly falling quickly, even if they're still high in absolute terms. #JOLTS
There were 1.2 job openings for every unemployed worker in May. That's more or less where things stood immediately before the pandemic (when the labor market was widely viewed as strong but not overheated).
The U.S. economy slowed in the final three months of the year, but only because the Q3 number was so strong -- the 3.3% growth rate in Q4 was well above expectations and certainly offered no hints of a brewing recession. (Belated charts thread)
This is not a case where the volatile components of G.D.P. made a weak quarter look strong, as sometimes happens. Measures of underlying demand were also very strong.
For all the predictions of a recession, G.D.P. growth actually *accelerated* in 2023, and topped the prepandemic average growth rate as well.
Job openings, quits and layoffs all edged down slightly in November. Consistent with a gradually cooling labor market, but definitely no sign things are falling off a cliff. #JOLTS
Data: bls.gov/news.release/j…
There were 8.8 million job openings on the last day of November. That's down a touch from October, but only because October was revised up. Big picture: Openings are trending down (and quite quickly, at that), but are still high by historical standards. #JOLTS
The number of job openings per unemployed worker actually ticked up in November (because unemployment fell), but ignore the noise. The labor market is becoming more balanced, though the ratio is (again) high relative to the prepandemic period.
The big increase in unemployment is mostly for "good" reasons: More people working, but also more people *looking* for work. Labor force grew by 736,000. Participation rate up by 0.2 percentage points.