Labor Market Uneven in August: Job Openings up, but Services Hit Hard

In the U.S. economy, the jobs market has been volatile to say the least.

To that end, the most recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover report released Tuesday (Oct. 1) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the total, “headline” number of jobs available were up in August — but depending on where you looked, the trends were at best uneven.

The BLS estimated that in August there were about 8 million job openings, a slight boost from the 7.7 million seen in July (which in turn was a number that had been revised upwardly, albeit slightly). The majority of opening increases were concentrated in construction (138,000) and state and local government, where the tally was up 78,000. Job openings decreased in services (such as in finance), sliding 93,000 roles, per the government report.

The pace of hiring was little changed month over month at 5.3 million.

One stat of note is that workers are choosing, by and large, to stay where they are — as the number of “quits” was 3.1 million, which is the lowest reading since the fall of 2020.

Though there was at least some growth in the overall data, July marked a bit of a recent nadir, as the job openings in that month were the lowest in about two and a half years.

The puts and takes of the August report indicate that we’re coming off a low base of momentum. And the tepid pace of quitting signals a reversal of at least some of the sentiment that we had seen in our own PYMNTS Intelligence surveys, where 1 in 5 workers had said that they’d be looking to switch jobs in 2024. Within that designation, a full 57% of millennials had said that they’d be “likely” to change jobs over the same timeframe.

At the same time, PYMNTS found that 85% of consumers said increases in their paychecks had not matched the pace of higher pricing. Eighty-two percent of respondents said concerns about inflation topped their lists of economic woes. That would have been enough to spur some looking around for new roles, but the recent decline in “quits” indicates that there may be some reticence to make a jump until the job openings picture improves, or interest rates continue to come down, or savings go up (which would improve financial cash cushions).

We’ll have more granular detail on the state of the labor market later in the week when payrolls and wage data are updated on Friday. As we reported here, as many as 70% of Americans report feeling stressed about their personal finances, with 75% of adults aged 18-34 expressing significant financial anxiety. Among Generation Z, 79% of hourly workers admit they frequently lack sufficient funds to cover their bills on time.

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