![]() This confirms other labor market data: Still huge demand for labor and tight supply. The number of people that continued to claim unemployment insurance in the week following the “initial” claim – the “insured unemployment” – fell by 29,000 from the prior week, to 1.347 million, just a hair above the record lows earlier this year and far below the levels of any other healthy labor market, and far far below recessionary levels – another sign of just how strong this labor market still is, and how powerful the labor shortages still are in absorbing people that have gotten laid off: But not yet (purple areas indicate recessions, recession dates from NBER). ![]() This would be a sign in the data that the labor market has started to run into serious trouble. Going back to the recessions through 1974, including the nasty “double-dip” recessions in the early 1980s, we can see how today’s initial claims for unemployment insurance still depict a strong labor market.īefore and during recessions, these initial claims for unemployment insurance surge because people who lost their jobs cannot find another job quickly because other companies too have stopped hiring or have started laying off people. Over the decades, significant and lasting spikes in initial unemployment claims were associated with recessions, and every recession was preceded by them. Initial unemployment claims are the most immediate measure of the labor market, and they just refuse to show any weakness. These weekly “initial unemployment claims” are not based on surveys, as other labor market data is, but on actual claims for unemployment compensation, filed by people who’ve lost their job and haven’t found another job yet, and who want to be paid unemployment benefits to tide them over. This shows that most of the people who are being laid off either already had a new job lined up when they walked out the door, or they’re finding a new job very quickly, before even filing for unemployment insurance: another sign of how strong the labor market still is: For the week ended September 24, released today by the US Department of Labor, the initial claims for unemployment insurance fell by 16,000 from the prior week to 193,000 (seasonally adjusted) – near historic lows. ![]() In addition, there are massive well-documented staff shortages in some sectors, such as schools (the “teacher shortage”), in healthcare, and others.Īnd we’re seeing that in the initial claims for unemployment insurance. ![]() ![]() Cake mania main street runs poorly serial#Then there are large companies that are laying off staff in the divisions they’re trimming back, but they’re hiring in their other divisions, and often employees can get hired by another division.Īnd they just don’t add up to the mass layoffs in the prior recessions, where big companies would make serial announcements of layoffs of 10,000 or 20,000 people at a time per company. Occasionally, there were layoffs of 1,000 or 2,000 people, and sometimes those are in global operations, with an unknown number in the US. Just about every day, there are stories of layoffs, but mostly small-scale layoffs, in the hundreds, 300 people here, 500 people there – of the 153 million employed people. It’s already playing a key role in every one of Powell’s press conferences. ![]()
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