“It kind of felt like everything went south economywise.” “After the shutdowns, everything was coming back to life, things were getting better, you had opportunities to choose from,” said Ms. On top of the narrowing job pool, everything - soda, bacon, gas - keeps getting pricier. Now she feels that the economy has turned on her. McCleary, who was laid off in August, spends 40 hours each week at the kitchen table searching for jobs.Ī year ago, she had switched to a new team at her company, buoyed by the labor shortage. She scrolls through hours-old openings that have already received hundreds of applications. Many of her friends in the mortgage lending industry are posting about layoffs. Meredith McCleary checks her LinkedIn every morning and sees images of her own economic pessimism staring back at her. Now many feel that the music is about to stop. The job market last year and earlier in 2022 was like musical chairs, offering record opportunities for hopping from seat to seat. Factory Jobs: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed during the pandemic - and then some.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.The State of Jobs in the United States Economists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation. ZipRecruiter’s job-seeker confidence index, which measures how hopeful people are about their ability to get hired, declined all summer, though it picked up slightly in September. The private-sector quitting rate dipped from its peak of 3.4 percent in November to 3 percent in August. There have been layoffs, hiring freezes or plans for them at a number of firms, including Goldman Sachs, Robinhood, Netflix, Amazon and Meta. Employers in banking, construction, manufacturing, retail and other industries expect to increase their staffs in the next three months, according to data from ManpowerGroup, a global staffing agency.īut the wide-open job market of late 2021 doesn’t feel as buoyant to workers anymore. Plenty of employers are still recruiting, and the number of people hired in August was essentially unchanged from the previous month. “Wages are the same, but the rent is going up, the price of food is going up.” “Ramen noodles have gone up a couple cents,” Ms. In a recent survey from FlexJobs, a remote jobs platform, 73 percent of employees and job candidates said the possibility of a recession was affecting their career decisions 80 percent said inflation was a factor. Many are sensing that after months of labor dynamics that gave employees and job seekers unusual leverage, the country’s economic interventions are about to hit some workers, especially low-income ones, hard, restricting their sense of possibility and optimism. “The trend has been toward less bargaining power for workers,” said Nick Bunker, director of North American economic research for the career site Indeed. With fears of a recession looming, workers who were flush with opportunities are beginning to feel the anxieties of tightened corporate budgets. Layoffs rose slightly, to 1.5 million, though they were still below their historical average. “But I wanted to get back into journalism, which is what I love.”Īfter months of a booming job market, which prompted workers to quit and raised wages across industries, the job openings rate declined in August. “I do kind of feel like, ‘Oh, Debbie, you should’ve jumped on that,’” Ms. But this summer, as her savings dried up and the cost of food rose, she began to feel that many of those backup opportunities had evaporated. Most important, every restaurant in Washington, D.C., seemed to be hiring at any moment, she figured, she could line up a job. She could supplement food stamps with the pasta and applesauce cans she found on the streets. She had unemployment checks coming in, $1,200 a month. Last year seemed to be the time for a professional leap. When Debbie Ricks lost her job as a server in March 2020, she decided to chase a long cast-aside ambition: She would try to become a photojournalist, and get away from her undertipping customers.
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