Covid blues: Workers in US quitting jobs at record pace

Workers in the Us are quitting their jobs at a record pace, Al Jazeera reported.

A high quitS rate normally signals how confident American workers feel about their job prospects. But a deeper dive into the data suggests that fear of contracting the Delta variant of Covid-19 could also be driving workers onto the sidelines, the report said.

The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey Â- JOLTS Âfrom the US Labor Department showed that the number of Americans quitting their jobs jumped to 4.3 million in August. That is 2.9% of all employed workers in the US, marking the highest quits rate on record.

Meanwhile, the number of job openings in the US fell slightly to 10.4 million in August, but that follows on from July which saw a record 11.1 million jobs go begging.

Some 892,000 workers in the customer-facing accommodation and food services sectors quit their jobs amid an August surge in Covid cases. That is 157,000 more than the previous month.

The number of people walking off the job and the sheer number of job vacancies has become an increasing source of concern for the nation's economic recovery.

Jobs are only officially minted when someone is hired, and the economy added only 194,000 them in September. That is the tiniest monthly gain this year.

The US labour market is still roughly five million jobs shy of recouping the 22 million jobs lost to the first wave of Covid lockdowns last year. But some 51 per cent of small business owners said they had job openings they could not fill in September, according to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business