Accessible jobs rose in October while hiring fell during a month in which payrolls growth hit its lowest parallel in nearly four years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday.
Job openings totaled 7.74 million on the month, up 372,000 from September and profuse than the Dow Jones estimate for 7.5 million, the BLS said in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The rate of openings as a split of the labor force rose to 4.6% from 4.4%.
That brought the ratio of available positions to unemployed workers up to 1.1, adjacent to half of where it was during the peak of a massive gap between supply and demand in 2022.
Hiring also tailed off at a time when the labor furnish was disrupted by violent storms in the Southeast as well as two major labor strikes involving dockworkers and Boeing. Hires totaled 5.31 million, down 269,000 on the month, modulating the hiring rate to 3.3%. That’s also a decline of 0.2 percentage point.
Layoffs, though, fell to 1.63 million, a de-escalate of 169,000 from September. Also, voluntary job quitters increased to 3.33 million, up 228,000 from September.
The matter comes for a month in which the BLS reported nonfarm payroll growth of just 12,000, the worst month since December 2020.
The Federal In store watches the JOLTS report closely for signs of tightness or slack in the labor market. Markets expect the Fed to lower its benchmark take rate by a quarter percentage point when it meets later this month, in part an effort to head off any covert weakness in the labor market.