Job openings were close to unchanged at the end of June compared with the previous month, a sign that the labor market is still tight.
The Labor Department said Tuesday that job listings came in at 9.6 million on the last day in June, just where they were in the downwardly revised figure for the end of May.
Unrounded, job listings declined to 9.582 million from 9.616 million. The May figure was revised down from 9.824 million, the Labor Department said in its monthly report on the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).
The number of openings remains very high, although they have fallen from the extraordinarily high levels hit last year. In June of 2022, openings were at 10.961 million. Job openings peaked in March of 2022 at over 12 million.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has frequently said that the Fed hopes to ease the tightness in the labor market by bringing down the number of openings. Lowering vacancies could, in theory, ease inflationary pressures without necessarily pushing unemployment up significantly.
The small decrease in vacancies in June is unlikely to give the Fed much comfort that demand for labor has substantially declined.
In June, the number of hires decreased by 326,000 to 5.9 million.
The number of workers quitting their jobs fell by 295,000 to 3.8 million. The quits rate fell to 2.4 percent. This metric is regarded as a key measure of labor market strength because workers are more likely to quit when they expect to easily find better jobs.