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 think the employment report on Friday is the more important number. We’ll be looking for what the revisions are, because those last two months were pretty shocking, and we expect this month to be light again, similar to what we had last month.”
Wednesday’s data is yet another sign that the labor market isn’t just cooling, it has grown stale: Hiring remained stagnant, workers stayed put and layoffs remained low.
The all-important turnover needed for a healthy labor market has become all but nonexistent.
The July JOLTS data “offers a good reminder of why labor market churn matters: It can help drive up wages, create more opportunities for a broader range of workers to enter the market, and support innovation,” Allison Shrivastava, an economist at employment site Indeed, wrote Wednesday. “For the past few months, the opposite has largely held true.”
In addition to being less dynamic, the job market has become increasingly reliant upon a select few industries — primarily health care, with leisure and hospitality to a lesser extent — to drive overall employment growth. However, even opportunities within those industries appear to be shrinking.
Job openings fell the most in health care and social assistance in July and also dipped somewhat in leisure and hospitality, Wednesday’s data showed.
Openings picked up the most in wholesale trade, construction and the federal government (where areas such as immigration enforcement are on a hiring spree while other agencies are trying to claw back workers after the Trump administration’s deep workforce cuts).
Wednesday’s report also showed that hiring was flat across most sectors (including health care and the federal government). The biggest hiring gains were in “other services” (a catch-all category that includes jobs such as repair, maintenance, pet care, etc.) and wholesale trade.
