America is in a serious jobs slump

Summary

Facebook Tweet Email Link Employment gains were so weak in the July jobs report that President Donald Trump fired the head of the bureau charged with collecting the data, baselessly claiming it was rigged. But fresh figures out Wednesday show that those meager job totals weren’t an anomaly: For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs than there are job seekers. “This is a turning point for the labor market,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote Wednesday. “It’s yet another crack.” The number of job openings was an estimated 7.18 million at the end of July, falling from a downwardly revised 7.36 million the month before, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Wednesday. Job openings are now not only at their lowest level in 10 months, but they’re also below the number of unemployed workers (at 7.2 million) for the first time since April 2021. Economists were expecting that openings would shrink slightly from June and land at 7.37 million for July, according to FactSet consensus estimates. The labor turnover activity reported in the JOLTS reports comes from a different survey than the monthly jobs report, so the figures aren’t meant to match up exactly. However, it can still provide a good sense of underlying trends: Like most economic metrics, JOLTS is meant to be viewed and analyzed in concert with other data. Wednesday’s JOLTS report is the first of several major labor market data releases due out in this holiday-abbreviated week, culminating with the August jobs report on Friday. Economists expect job gains to remain fairly tepid, at 80,000, and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 4.2%, according to FactSet estimates. “What I was really looking for (in the JOLTS data) was for any revisions, because we had those huge revisions [to the May and June jobs reports] but that was not the case,” Dan North, senior economist for North America at Allianz Trade, told CNN in an interview. “Certainly, I t...