The tight labor market, one of the principal complaints of U.S. employers for the past year, eased a bit in August.
American business have been raising the alarm that growth could be held back by the lack of qualified workers, urging Congress to adopt looser rules for foreign workers and seeking government subsidies for training new workers.
Some of those concerns may be allayed by new data from the Labor Department showing that job openings declined 4 percent in August from a year prior to 7.1 million, the third consecutive month of annual declines. Job openings still outnumber the unemployed by about 1 million in August, indicating that employers may need to raise wages to attract workers out of their current positions.
The data come from the Labor Department’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
Unemployment has fallen this year, recently hitting 3.5 percent. That has contributed to slowdown in payroll growth. Payrolls have grown by an average 161,000 jobs per month so far in 2019, a decline from the average of 223,000 in 2018.
The share of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs remains high, although it ticked down in August from 2.4 percent to 2.3 percent. Still, even with the tick down, a larger percentage of Americans are quitting their jobs than have at any time prior to this year than a one-month period in 2005. Prior to that, quits had not been so high since March of 2001.
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