Job Seekers v. Jobs
A glimmer of good news in the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released today: In July, there were more job openings than in June — the first positive month-on-month change since April. The number of advertised gigs rose 6.2 percent, to 3 million. (In Dec. 2007, before the recession started, there were 4.4 million available positions.)
Moreover, the ratio of workers looking for jobs to job openings turned down again, and now stands about 4.8 versus a high of 6.2. The higher the ratio, the greater the competition for available jobs. Here is a graph of the monthly ratio from the Economic Policy Institute:
That said, any improvement in the jobs market has been slight. And the jobseekers-to-jobs ratio has drifted lower at least in part because hundreds of thousands of discouraged workers have left the labor market (and therefore do not count in government data). EPI’s Heidi Shierholz notes:
“„[I]f we were to include not just the 14.6 million officially unemployed workers, but also the 2.6 million “marginally attached” workers (jobless workers who want a job, are available work, have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work and are therefore not counted as officially unemployed), the ratio would be 5.7-to-one.
