By one measure, prospects for unemployed workers are as good as they have been since 2001.
There were just 1.3 jobless workers for every advertised job opening in November, the Department of Labor announced Tuesday, a level not seen before this year in 16 years. The ratio dipped below 1.4 in July and May.
Tuesday’s jobs news came from the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a report that contains details about gross hiring and layoffs, adjusted for seasonal variations. Although the agency releases the report a month after the more widely-noted jobs report, the Federal Reserve and investors value it because of the level of granularity it provides about the dynamics of the labor market.
The background for Tuesday’s report was that other job market news has been encouraging. At 4.7 percent in December, the unemployment rate was already near as low as Fed officials think it can go and still be sustained. Payroll job growth averaged 165,000 a month in the last quarter of 2016, around twice as much as Fed economists think is necessary to keep unemployment trending down. The December jobs report also showed hourly wages growing at the fastest rate of the jobs recovery, a sign that labor markets around the country are getting tight.
The survey released Tuesday showed that not much changed, in terms of labor market churn, heading into the winter. At 5.5 million, total job openings were about where they hovered all year. Hiring ticked up slightly to just over 5.2 million, after it slowed in recent months as the unemployment rate has come down and many businesses have had increasing difficulties finding workers.
Beneath the headline numbers, the report suggested specific sectors that are likely to heat up in the months ahead. Job openings in construction are up 80 percent on the year, but actual hiring has fallen slightly, suggesting that employers will have to increase wages to find new workers. Similarly, manufacturing vacancies are up by over a third, but hiring has dropped very marginally.
