Mass Hiring, Mass Layoffs Create a Jobs Market Puzzle
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, February 10th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. For the U.S. labor market, these are the best of times and the worst of times. While jobs are being added to the economy at a red-hot pace, thousands of others are being handed the pink slip.
The recent job market data really points to the fact that the labor market is coming back into balance after experiencing years of pandemic disruptions.
So in which direction is the jobs market headed? Wall Street Journal economics reporter Sarah Cheney Kambon has been tracking who's hiring. She'll be here to talk about it after the break.
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What overall jobs market puzzle is this episode introducing?
Sarah, thank you so much for being with us. Thanks so much for having me, J.R. So, Sarah, we've seen different areas of the economy kind of ebb and flow over the past year, influenced by things like higher inflation and rising interest rates. But that hasn't really been the case in the labor market.
Absolutely. The U.S. labor market actually added 1.1 million jobs over the past few months. And January was a really strong month for hiring. At the same time, we've seen a lot of big companies, particularly in tech, laying off workers.
Yeah, and the growing list of tech companies we mentioned that are laying off workers, that's been capturing a lot of headlines, but it hasn't seemed to move the needle downward in terms of the overall labor market. So who's doing all the hiring?
Companies like restaurants and hospitals, nursing homes, and child care centers are really ramping up hiring. These are really large parts of the economy, but they're somewhat overlooked areas. The bulk of it has been concentrated in these services industries. They actually accounted for 63% of all private sector job gains over the past six months, and that's up from 47% in the preceding year and a half.
Yeah, an early casualty of the pandemic were jobs that required close personal contact with people.
Yes, absolutely. Those are jobs like cafeteria worker, restaurant server, nurse, massage therapist. A lot of those jobs were really hard hit at the beginning of the pandemic and really throughout 2020.
Eventually, businesses opened back up. But what happened to the service workers?
A lot of the workers were burnt out and they quit their jobs. They left the labor force or found other opportunities. And some of these workers decided that they wanted to move from a restaurant job into something like a white collar remote work job. So there was lots of kind of transitions going on there so that when the restaurants reopened, they were really struggling to find workers.
Now, you also spoke to people doing the hiring in the service industry. What has this trend been like for them?
I spoke to one restaurant manager who actually was basically running the fast food joint himself. He's actually getting job applicants now, which is a shift from early 2021 through mid 2022, when he was actually having to run a lot of the operations himself, you know, like working the drive-through window, frying the chicken fingers, plating the food.
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