Brittany Luce

Yeah.

And, you know, there's this labor economist I've interviewed before who I think has captured a really nice empirical measure of this shift that you're describing, Brittany.

So his name is Aaron Sojourner.

He's a labor economist.

And he came up with something called the labor leverage ratio.

And it's very elegant.

It is the ratio of quits to layoffs.

And so basically, it's a measure of worker power.

This is how he describes it.

Because workers

When workers have a lot of outside options, then quits go up.

But when bosses have more options, then firings go up.

And during the grant resignation, workers had lots of options if they wanted to leave their job and go find one that they found more fulfilling, that paid them more, that offered better benefits, that let them work remotely or move across the country or to a different country or something like that.

And now that's going away because the labor market is cooling down.

So we are seeing this shift in power back to employers from workers.

So this phenomenon of people sending out like hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back, is that new?

And if it is, why is that happening?

Yeah, they call this ghost jobs, and that can take a bunch of different forms, but it's definitely a thing.

We've documented it on the indicator.

And just to give you one stat, for that indicator episode, we talked to this jobs analytics company, and this company analyzed online job postings, and they said that in 2018...