Latest news with #GuyBerger
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
New Data Provide a Pre-Tariff Snapshot of a Stable but Slowing Labor Market
The labor market remained sound in March, with job openings declining but layoffs remaining near record lows, while rates of new hiring were slow but steady, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday. The numbers from last month are a snapshot of the state of the U.S. economy and labor market before the start of the global trade volatility brought on by President Trump's tariff campaign. 'It reflects a labor market that 'could have been,' given the damage tariffs will do,' argued Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, which studies the labor market. 'We have the foundations of a labor market stabilization,' he added, 'but trade policy has other ideas.' The prevailing environment before April of subdued hiring and few firings was not an easy one for active job seekers, especially in certain sectors like tech and manufacturing. But the stability of the overall job market was undeniable — so much so that some labor economists started to worry that the conditions bordered on stagnant. Now, the economy is facing a radically different set of challenges. Consumer sentiment has plunged since January, when the import taxes were announced by the White House, as fears of both job loss and higher inflation have surged among households and top business leaders. The effects of the tariffs on shipping have not yet been fully felt. But experts in global freight logistics, such as Craig Fuller, the founder of FreightWaves, expect that to change in the coming days and weeks as companies face tariffs ranging from 10 percent to well over 120 percent on many Chinese goods. Federal job openings declined by 36,000 in March, a result of the Trump administration's steep cutbacks to the federal civil service. And in the overall labor market, job openings fell by 288,000. Some financial analysts are focused on a broader, monthslong pre-tariff slowdown. 'The main story is that job openings are down,' said Neil Dutta, the head of economics at the research firm Renaissance Macro. 'We are at the point where opening declines push up unemployment.' The jobs report for April will help fill out some of the economic picture. Economists expect unemployment to have been largely unchanged and for moderate job growth to have continued. But forecasters are bracing for surprises because of the uncertainty surrounding the tariffs. The employment picture and consumer spending remain bright for now — a point that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emphasized in his public remarks. But many analysts, including Daniel Altman, the chief economist at Instawork, a job search and recruitment site, are in wait-and-see mode. 'I think the jobs report will be more revealing,' Mr. Altman said.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Job Market Is Frozen
Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around. Only they didn't. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother's. 'It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,' one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May. As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. 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. [Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy] The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself. The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. 'It's hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,' Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. 'No one wanted to go through anything like it again.' Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones. Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America's economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees. Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. 'The most common thing I hear from employers is 'We can't move forward if we don't know where the world is going to be in six months,'' Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. 'Survive Until '25' became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country. By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged. Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The 'professional and business services' sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.) [David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war] A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn't change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest. For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers' confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling 'stuck' in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions. This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. 'This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,' Pollak told me. 'A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.' According to economists and executives, the labor market won't thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
26-02-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Job Market Is Frozen
Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around. Only they didn't. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother's. 'It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,' one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May. As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. 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. Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself. The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. 'It's hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,' Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. 'No one wanted to go through anything like it again.' Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones. Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America's economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees. Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. 'The most common thing I hear from employers is 'We can't move forward if we don't know where the world is going to be in six months,'' Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. 'Survive Until '25' became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country. By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged. Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The 'professional and business services' sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.) David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn't change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest. For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers' confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling 'stuck' in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market —the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions. This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. 'This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,' Pollak told me. 'A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.' According to economists and executives, the labor market won't thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fewer Americans quitting their jobs—here's why
The Brief The number of U.S. workers quitting their jobs fell 11% in 2024 to 39.6 million, a 22% drop from 2022's peak. Job openings have declined, with 1.1 available positions per unemployed worker, down from 2 per person in 2022. While layoffs remain low, businesses are slowing hiring and focusing on cost control over expansion. LOS ANGELES - The post-pandemic Great Resignation appears to be over. New data from the Labor Department, analyzed by The Wall Street Journal, shows fewer Americans are quitting their jobs as opportunities for job-switching shrink. While the labor market remains stable, businesses are becoming more cautious, and hiring has slowed. By the numbers In 2024, 39.6 million workers quit, down 11% from 2023 and 22% from 2022, when job switching peaked. The share of employees quitting each month has also dropped below pre-pandemic levels, and some economists expect it to decline further. A major factor is the decline in job openings. In 2022, there were two job openings per unemployed worker—now that ratio has dropped to 1:1, making it tougher to find new opportunities. Hiring has also slowed, with 66 million new hires in 2024, down from 71 million in 2023. The other side Experts point to a combination of factors affecting the labor market: Fewer high-paying office jobs – Sectors like tech and law, which aggressively hired post-pandemic, have cut back on hiring. More focus on automation – RTX (formerly Raytheon) and other companies are investing in automation instead of hiring. Cautious business outlook – Employers are controlling salary costs rather than recruiting heavily, with Meta and other major firms making job cuts. Michael Distefano, CEO of Korn Ferry's professional-search business, told The Wall Street Journal that white-collar jobs have been in a hiring slump. "The past 18 to 24 months have been just more of a steady malaise," he said. What's next Economists will be watching Friday's January jobs report, which is expected to show 170,000 new jobs added, down from 256,000 in December, The Wall Street Journal reported. Guy Berger, an economist at the Burning Glass Institute, told The Wall Street Journal that the labor market has cooled without major layoffs—but that might not last forever. "This labor market has shown that it can keep cooling for a long time without things breaking," he said. "Forever? Probably not." The Source This article is based on reporting from FOX Business and The Wall Street Journal.
