Eric Morath
speaker
273 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2017
last heard Sep 2020
Eric Morath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Jobs Openings Have Leveled Off, But There's Still Hope · 10 Sep 2020
podcast
Yeah, they're a bit of a forward-looking signal, so that's why this is a concern.
If businesses are optimistic that consumer demand will grow, that there's going to be more people wanting their goods and services, you'd see postings increase.
Seeing them flatlining suggests that businesses are being a little bit more cautious.
Maybe they'll stick with the employees they have.
It doesn't foretell layoffs, but it means that there's not going to be as many new opportunities for workers.
And that's a big concern when the unemployment rate, while it's down from this spring, is
still above 8%, and that's a historically high number.
The job growth has come in a few different spots.
Two categories stand out as having, in terms of postings, fully made up their losses, and that's in construction, and we're seeing a lot of strength in residential home building.
That had been an area that had been a bit iffy over the past decade and seems to be at least having a mini boom now as people are interested in having more space, maybe moving out to the suburbs.
The other area that's strong is anything dealing with logistics, warehousing, stocking.
Those job postings are up because people are purchasing things online and you need to get that to their door and it's a little different than the regular retail.
The concern there, though, is a lot of those jobs, we're talking about $10 or $15 an hour jobs.
So there might be jobs out there, but it could be a trade down for a worker who lost a better paying job during the pandemic.
Yeah, there's definitely a concern about that, particularly in restaurants and in parts of retail, especially if you think of like mall retailers where a lot of them have closed locations, even filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic.
So we still see job postings in those categories down more than 20%.
And that's a sign that, you know,
I wouldn't expect there to be big increases.
If anything, I might see that those companies might offer opportunities for good employees to transfer from closing locations to ones that might remain open.
And that's going to limit their need to seek out new employees from outside their existing labor force.
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