April job openings show rise to 10.1M

Report helps ease fears of recession

After three consecutive months of declines, job openings jumped in April, reaching 10.1 million, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

The surge signals that job opportunities are withstanding the economic pressures that have led many to believe that the American economy may soon enter a recession.

At the same time, the report — known as JOLTS, or the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — showed that the labor market was far less feverish than it was a year earlier.

The quits rate — viewed as an indicator of how confident workers are in leaving a job and finding employment elsewhere — was 3%, seasonally adjusted, in April 2022.

Since then, it has retreated to 2.4%, just above its prepandemic peak. And the hiring rate was unchanged from March, which was the lowest since December 2020.

Layoffs, however, decreased again, showing that employers are hesitant to let go of employees brought on board during this recovery.

The data complicates the interest rate outlook.

The jump in openings may put pressure on the Federal Reserve to take interest rates even higher.

The statistical relationship between high job vacancies, as calculated by the government, and low unemployment has been frequently cited by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as a key sign of the labor market’s being “unsustainably hot” and “clearly out of balance, with demand for workers substantially exceeding the supply of available workers.”

But even as some economists remain unsatisfied with the progress on subduing prices, others worry that reliance on job openings as a core measure of labor market balance may lead the Fed to keep the cost of borrowing for businesses and households too high for too long, prompting a harsher downturn than necessary.

“The quits rate is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels, the hires rate has already reverted to pre-pandemic pace,” Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a nonprofit that supports tight labor markets, wrote in a note.

“JOLTS data should not drastically color this broader assessment of labor market tightness but will matter at the margins for the Fed’s own perception of labor market heat.”

The May jobs report will be the next gauge.

The May employment report, to be released by the Labor Department on Friday, will fill out the labor market picture before Fed policymakers meet June 13 and 14.