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    U.S. Employers Added 253,000 Jobs Despite Economic Worries

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    Employers added 253,000 jobs in April and unemployment fell to 3.4 percent, but the labor market’s strength complicates the Fed’s inflation fight.The labor market is still defying gravity — for now.Employers added 253,000 jobs in April on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported Friday, in a departure from the cooling trend that had marked the first quarter and was expected to continue.The unemployment rate was 3.4 percent, down from 3.5 percent in March, and matched the level in January, which was the lowest since 1969. Wages also popped slightly, growing 4.4 percent over the past year.The higher-than-forecast job gain complicates the Federal Reserve’s potential shift toward a pause in interest rate increases. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said on Wednesday that the central bank might continue to raise rates if new data showed the economy wasn’t slowing enough to keep prices down.It’s also an indication that the failure of three banks and the resulting pullback on lending, which is expected to hit smaller businesses particularly hard, hasn’t yet hamstrung job creation.“All these things are telling us it’s not a hard stop; it’s creating a headwind, but not a debilitating headwind,” said Carl Riccadonna, the chief U.S. economist at BNP Paribas. “A gradual downturn is happening, but it sure is stubborn and persistent in the trend.” Despite the strong showing in April, the labor market continues to gently descend from blistering highs.Downward revisions to the previous two months’ data meaningfully altered the spring employment picture, subtracting a total of 149,000 jobs. That brings the three-month average to 222,000 jobs, a clear slowdown from the 400,000 added on average in 2022. Most economists expect a more marked downshift later in the year.Jobs increased across industriesChange in jobs in April 2023, by sector More

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    Wages Grow Steadily, Defying Fed’s Hopes as it Fights Inflation

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    Wage growth ticked up in April, good news for American workers but bad news for officials at the Federal Reserve, who have been hoping to see a steady moderation in pay gains as they try to wrestle inflation back under control.Average hourly earnings climbed by 4.4 percent in the year through April. That compared with 4.3 percent in the previous month, and was more than the 4.2 percent that economists had expected.The increase in wages compared with the previous month — at 0.5 percent — was the fastest since March 2022.The hourly earnings measure can bounce around from month to month, so it is possible that the April increase is a blip rather than a reversal in the trend toward cooler wage gains. Even so, the data underscored that the Fed faces a bumpy road as it tries to slow the economy and bring inflation under control.Fed officials are closely watching the pace of wage growth as they try to assess how quickly inflation is likely to fade. While officials regularly acknowledge that wage gains did not initially cause rapid price increases, they worry that it will prove difficult to return inflation to normal with pay gains rising so rapidly.Companies may charge more in order to cover their climbing labor costs. And when households are earning more, they are more capable of keeping up with higher expenses without pulling back their spending — enabling businesses to charge more for hotel rooms, child care and restaurant meals without scaring away consumers.The Fed has raised interest rates at the fastest pace since the 1980s starting from March 2022. Officials this week lifted borrowing costs to just about 5 percent and signaled that they might pause their rate moves as soon as their June meeting, depending on incoming economic data.Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, noted during his news conference this week that wage growth has remained strong. He suggested the solid job market was one reason the Fed would likely keep rates high to continue slowing the economy “for a while” as it tried to wrestle inflation, which remains above 4 percent, back to the central bank’s 2 percent goal.“Right now, you have a labor market that is still extraordinarily tight,” he said, noting that a more dated wage figure released last week was “a couple percentage points above what would be consistent with 2 percent inflation over time.”That measure, the Employment Cost Index, showed that wages and salaries for private-sector U.S. workers were up 5.1 percent in March from a year earlier. While that is somewhat faster than the gain reported by the overall average hourly earnings figures for April that were released Friday, it is roughly in line with a closely-watched measure within the monthly jobs report that tracks pay gains for rank and file workers.Pay for production and nonsupervisory workers — essentially, people who are not managers — climbed by 5 percent in the year through April, Friday’s report showed. That number has continued to gradually moderate, even as the slowdown in the overall index has stalled.Fed policymakers will have another month of job and wage data in hand before they make their next interest-rate decision on June 14, making Friday’s figures just one of many factors that are likely to inform whether they pause rate increases or press ahead with more policy adjustments. Officials will also have further evidence of how much the recent turmoil in the banking sector is slowing the economy before they next meet.A series of high-profile bank failures have spooked investors and could generate caution at lenders across the country, which could make it harder to access loans for construction projects and mortgages and help to cool growth — but it is unclear so far how large that effect will be.Perhaps most importantly, officials will receive fresh inflation data before their next decision.“They’ll need to see the inflation data and digest this holistically,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. She said that the strong jobs numbers were just one month of data, but that they were “jarring” to see at a moment when economists had been looking for a slowdown.“Assuming that the inflation numbers continue to trend lower gradually, I think they can go on hold in June,” she said of the Fed. “But it will depend in the inflation readings.” More

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    Job Openings Slipped in March as Labor Market Continued Cooling

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    The NewsJob openings in March fell to 9.6 million, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday, the lowest level in two years and a further indication that the slowdown in the labor market is becoming more entrenched. It was the third straight month that job openings have declined, a notable development after last year, when job openings bounced around month to month.“The labor market has been, through Q1, a resilient anchor for the economy,” said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at the career site Glassdoor. “But we’re getting more and more signals that those foundations are really starting to tremble.”Transportation, warehousing and utilities, professional and businesses services and construction were among the sectors that posted large drops in open positions, as higher interest rates and fears of a pullback in consumer spending continued to discourage employers from hiring.Other readings in Tuesday’s report underscored the labor market’s restraint. The total number of open jobs per available unemployed worker, a ratio that the Federal Reserve has been watching as it tries to tame rapid inflation, decreased slightly to 1.6, the lowest level since October 2021. Layoffs, which have remained historically low outside of some big-name companies in the tech sector, rose to 1.8 million in March. The number of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs — a sign that workers are finding opportunities to switch to better-paid positions, or are confident they can do so — was relatively unchanged but has been inching down.Policymakers are interested in the number of open jobs per available unemployed worker, which has remained stubbornly high for months.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The last major data release before the Fed’s rate decision.The report released on Tuesday, called the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is one of many that the Federal Reserve watches closely each month to gauge its efforts to slow the economy and ease inflation without spurring widespread layoffs.The Fed has been raising interest rates for more than a year as it tries to bring down rapid inflation to its target of 2 percent. It will announce its next decision on Wednesday; officials are widely expected to raise rates by a quarter percentage point, to just above 5 percent. The JOLTS report is the last major piece of data that Fed policymakers will see before their decision.In particular, they are interested in the number of open jobs per available unemployed worker, which has remained stubbornly high for months. That mismatch has helped to drive up pay and contributed to inflation. More recently, however, the ratio has been declining, a welcome sign for the Fed that underscores the labor market’s gradual slowdown.Officials also track other details in the report, including the number of layoffs and workers who quit their jobs. The Background: Labor market resilience complicates the Fed’s plan.Month after month, the labor market has remained robust, defying expectations and complicating the Fed’s efforts to cool the economy. The latest evidence came on Friday, when government data showed that wages and salaries for private-sector workers were up 5.1 percent in March from a year earlier, the same growth rate as in December.Still, higher interest rates are taking a toll on the job market, albeit gradually. Employers added 236,000 jobs in March, a healthy number but down from an average of 334,000 jobs added over the prior six months. The year-over-year growth in average hourly earnings also fell to its slowest pace since July 2021.What’s Next: A big week for economic news.The report on Tuesday kicked off a big few days for economic news.In addition to the Fed decision on Wednesday, there will be the Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of the employment situation on Friday. The report, based on April data, will provide a clearer and more up-to-date picture of the labor market, including the change in the number of jobs — a figure that has been positive for 27 straight months — and the unemployment rate. More

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    Job Openings Fell in February, JOLTS Report Shows

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    The U.S. job market continues to ease off its red-hot pace, a government report shows, but there are still more openings than unemployed workers.Demand for workers in the United States eased in February, a sign that the red-hot labor market continues to cool off somewhat.There were 9.9 million job openings in February, down from 10.6 million on the last day of January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS.The drop in open positions is a signal that the labor market is slowing, but the report included data that points to a still-healthy environment for workers: Four million workers quit their jobs during the month, a slight increase from January, and the number of layoffs decreased slightly to 1.5 million.There were 1.7 jobs open for every unemployed worker in February, a decline from 1.9 in January. The Federal Reserve has been paying close attention to that ratio as it looks to slow hiring, part of its effort to contain inflation.Until recent months, the number of available jobs had risen substantially as the economy recovered from the pandemic recession, with companies rushing to hire workers after public health restrictions were rolled back.“The general trend in JOLTS in recent months has been a gradual movement back toward more normal labor market dynamics,” said Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “This looks more like a rebalancing. Job openings were way up in the stratosphere.”The gradual slowing may be encouraging for policymakers. Fed officials worry that a tight job market is contributing to inflation, as employers may feel pressure to raise wages to compete for workers and then pass along price increases to consumers. The number of available openings has remained high in spite of climbing borrowing costs.The central bank has raised interest rates to about 5 percent, from near zero, over the past year, aiming to make it costlier for companies to expand and consumers to spend. But it also wants to avoid setting off widespread layoffs or causing lasting damage to the labor market.“We’re still in a market that is quite strong,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. But, he added, “the cool-off is more apparent now.”One measure of inflation that the Fed watches closely — the Personal Consumption Expenditures index — showed that price gains slowed substantially in February, to 5 percent on an annual basis, down from 5.3 percent in January.Despite high-profile job cuts in the tech sector, layoffs overall have been historically low, a sign that employers may be reluctant to part with workers hired during pandemic-era spikes. The number of workers quitting their jobs voluntarily — a sign that they are confident they can find work elsewhere — rose slightly in February, to four million.“The layoffs we’re seeing all over the media in tech and finance are being more than offset by an absence of layoffs and discharges in the Main Street economy,” Ms. Pollak said. “Labor-market dynamics look pretty favorable to workers still,” she added.JOLTS is considered a lagging indicator, telling more about conditions in the recent past than offering information about what may come. On Friday, the Labor Department will release employment data for March. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect the report to show that employers added about 240,000 jobs, a slight slowdown from February but still a pace of hiring that reflects a robust labor market. More

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    Jobs Report Gives Fed a Mixed Signal Ahead of Its March Decision

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    The Federal Reserve is anxiously parsing incoming data as it decides between a small or a large rate move this month.Federal Reserve officials received a complicated signal from February’s employment report, which showed that job growth retained substantial momentum nearly a year into the central bank’s campaign to slow the economy and cool rapid inflation. But it also included details hinting that the softening the Fed has been trying to achieve may be coming.Policymakers have raised interest rates from near zero to above 4.5 percent over the past year, and Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, signaled this week that the size of the central bank’s March 22 rate move would hinge on the strength of incoming data — making Friday’s employment report a critical focal point for investors.But the figures painted a complicated picture. Employers added 311,000 workers last month, which were more than the 225,000 expected and a sign that the pace of hiring has cooled little, if at all, over the past year. At the same time, wage growth moderated to its slowest monthly pace since February 2022, and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly.“It’s exactly what I wasn’t hoping for, which is a mixed report,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan.That makes determining the Fed’s next steps more challenging.Officials raised rates in large three-quarter-point increments four times in 2022, making borrowing sharply more expensive in hopes of restraining a hot economy. But they had been slowing the pace of adjustment for months, stepping down to half a point in December and a quarter point in February. Policymakers thought they had reached the point where interest rates were high enough to significantly cool the economy, so they expected to soon stop raising rates and simply hold them at a high level for a while.But data from early 2023 have surprised the central bank. The labor market, inflation and consumer spending all showed unexpected signs of strength, which made policymakers question whether they might need to raise rates by more — or even return to a faster pace of adjustment. That’s why central bankers have been looking to incoming data from February for a sense of whether the robust January figures were a one-off or a genuine sign of strength.Employers added 311,000 workers last month, which were more than expected and a sign that the pace of hiring has cooled little.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“If the totality of the data were to indicate that faster tightening is warranted, we would be prepared to increase the pace of rate hikes,” Mr. Powell told lawmakers this week, emphasizing that “no decision has been made on this.”Friday’s figures suggested that hiring is genuinely resilient: Employers added more than half a million workers in the first month of the year, even after revisions.But the slowdown in wage growth could be good news for the central bank. Officials have been nervously eyeing rapid wage gains, fretting that it will be difficult for inflation to cool when employers are paying more and trying to make up for those climbing labor bills by passing the costs along to consumers.That said, a closely watched measure of wages for production workers who are not managers — rank-and-file employees, basically — held up. Wage data bounce around, and economists often watch that measure for a clearer reading of underlying momentum in pay gains.Priya Misra, head of global rates strategy at TD Securities, said she thought the report made the size of the Fed’s next rate move a “tossup.” The pace of hiring is likely to suggest to officials that the labor market is still hot, but the other details could give them some room to watch and wait.“It’s not an obvious slam dunk for 50,” Ms. Misra said, referring to a half-point move.The upshot, she said, is that investors will need to closely watch the Consumer Price Index report that is scheduled for release on Tuesday. The fresh figures will show how hot inflation was running in February, giving central bankers a final critical reading on where the American economy stands heading into their decision.“It makes this the most important C.P.I. report — again,” Ms. Misra said.Economists in a Bloomberg survey expect monthly inflation readings — which give a clearer sense of iterative progress on cooling price increases — to slow on an overall basis, but to hold steady at 0.4 percent after volatile food and fuel prices are stripped out.The State of Jobs in the United StatesThe labor market continues to display strength, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Mislabeling Managers: New evidence shows that many employers are mislabeling rank-and-file workers as managers to avoid paying them overtime.Energy Sector: Solar, wind, geothermal, battery and other alternative-energy businesses are snapping up workers from fossil fuel companies, where employment has fallen.Elite Hedge Funds: As workers around the country negotiate severance packages, employees in a tiny and influential corner of Wall Street are being promised some of their biggest paydays ever.Immigration: The flow of immigrants and refugees into the United States has ramped up, helping to replenish the American labor force. But visa backlogs are still posing challenges.One challenge is that the numbers will come out during the Fed’s pre-meeting quiet period, which is in place all of next week, so central bankers will not be able to tell the world how they are interpreting the new data.Further complicating the picture: Glimmers of stress are surfacing in the banking system, ones that are tied to the Fed’s rapid rate moves over the past 12 months. Silicon Valley Bank, which lent to tech start-ups and failed on Friday, was squeezed partly by the jump in interest rates.That development — and the possibility that it might herald trouble at other regional banks — could also matter to how the Fed understands the rate outlook.“It shows us: No, we haven’t really digested all of the effects of what the Fed has done so far,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies. “There’s still a lot of policy pain in the pipeline that hasn’t hit the economy yet.”William Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said there are probably other banks that loaded up on longer-term assets when rates were low and are now suffering from that as short-term borrowing costs rise. That makes those older assets less attractive — and less valuable — if a bank has to sell them to raise cash.But he said that Silicon Valley Bank was probably an extreme example, and that it’s possible the whole situation will have blown over by the time the Fed meets next.“By a week and a half from now, this whole thing could be over,” he said. He added, though, that he didn’t have much clarity on how big the Fed’s next rate move would be, in any case.“I am totally confused about the Fed at this point,” he said. More

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    Jobs Report to Offer Fresh Reading on Labor Market’s Tenacity

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    After a blockbuster opening to the year, economists expect the February data to show the return of a gradual slowdown in hiring.After an explosion in job growth at the start of the year, new data on Friday will show whether employers moderated their hiring in February — and whether any slowdown was enough to fundamentally upend the labor market’s momentum.Forecasters estimate that the economy added 225,000 positions last month, which would constitute a return to a gentle downward trend that January interrupted with an unexpected jump of 517,000 jobs. Labor Department surveyors have struggled to account for wildly varying seasonal factors, as well as whiplash from the pandemic, which is why revisions of data for December and January will be closely watched.On the surface, employment growth has reflected scant impact from a series of interest rate increases as the Federal Reserve works to contain inflation. Although goods-related industries have faded as consumers shift their spending back to traveling and dining out, backed-up demand and a reluctance to let go of scarce workers have prevented mass layoffs.And so far, the sharp cuts that have been announced in the technology industry haven’t spread widely.“There are sectors of the economy that have not recovered to prepandemic levels — especially leisure and hospitality — and they don’t care about higher interest rates,” said Eugenio Alemán, chief economist at the financial services firm Raymond James. “We have a scenario where the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors have already contracted, mainly housing, and those sectors have not been able to bring down the rest of the economy.”Analysts broadly expect the data to show little if any change in the nation’s unemployment rate, which last month reached a half-century low of 3.4 percent. Americans left the work force in droves at the outset of the pandemic and have been slow to return, helping to keep the job market exceptionally tight — there were still nearly two jobs for every unemployed person in January, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.Wage growth, which has been the Federal Reserve’s primary concern, is forecast to have sped up on a year-over-year basis, while remaining below last year’s blistering high.Since January, the persistent strength of the labor market appears to have fueled a renewed acceleration of economic indicators such as retail sales, as consumers continue to spend down piles of cash that accumulated during the pandemic. Even the housing market has recently shown signs of unfreezing, with new-home sales picking up as mortgage rates sank slightly (though they bounced back up in February).The brighter tenor of the data flow has prompted Fed officials — including Jerome H. Powell, the chair, during two days of testimony this week on Capitol Hill — to warn they may have to push interest rates higher than anticipated to suppress prices. More

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    Job Openings Fell Slightly in January; Layoffs Rose

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    The monthly data points to a cooling in the frenetic pace of hiring even as the labor market remains strong.Demand for workers let up slightly in January, a possible sign that employers are gradually easing off their frenetic pace of hiring even as the job market remains strong.There were 10.8 million job openings, a moderate decrease from 11.2 million on the last day of December, the Labor Department reported Wednesday in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS.The total number of open jobs per available unemployed worker — a figure that the Federal Reserve has been watching closely as it tries to cool the job market and ease inflation — was relatively unchanged at 1.9.Still, although employers have proved remarkably resilient in the face of the Fed’s interest rate increases, the drop in open positions is the latest indication that the once red-hot labor market is slowly cooling. Some industries that had shown unexpected strength recorded notable declines in open positions, including construction, where job openings fell by 240,000. Even leisure and hospitality businesses, like restaurants and bars, which have been trying to adjust to unrelenting demand, had slightly fewer open positions.“Job openings remain pretty sky high in January,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at the employment site ZipRecruiter. “But this report finally points to the slowdown in the labor market that many of us on the front line of the labor market have been observing.”An open question is whether the slowdown in the job market is sufficient for policymakers. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, made clear on Tuesday that recent reports showing the persistent strength of the labor market could require a more robust response from central bankers.Matthew Martin, an economist at Oxford Economics, said in a research note on Wednesday: “While the January JOLTS report shows job openings are heading in the right direction for the Fed, the decline is far too modest to convince that labor market conditions are cooling enough to bring down inflation.”A clearer picture of the job market will come on Friday, when the Labor Department releases employment data for February.Other measures in the report on Wednesday also suggested that the labor market was gently settling into a more normal state. Layoffs, which have been extraordinarily low outside of some high-profile companies mostly in the tech sector, rose by 241,000, to 1.7 million. That is the highest number since December 2020, when a winter wave of Covid-19 cases swept across the country and jolted the economy anew.The increase was driven by a surge of layoffs in the professional and business services sector, which includes advertising, accounting and architectural businesses. The rise in layoffs overall was heavily concentrated in the South.The number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs, which has been elevated as workers continue seek — and find — higher-paying jobs, fell in January by 207,000, to 3.9 million. The one-month drop was the largest since May, adding to the sense that employees are losing some of their power and job security that had characterized the pandemic era.Ben Casselman More

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    What Layoffs? Many Employers Are Eager to Hang On to Workers.

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    During the height of the pandemic, hungry and housebound customers clamored for Home Run Inn Pizza’s frozen thin-crust pies. The company did everything to oblige.It kept its machines chugging during lunch breaks and brought on temporary workers to ensure it could produce pizzas at the suddenly breakneck pace.More recently, demand has eased, and Home Run Inn Pizza, based in suburban Chicago, has reversed some of those measures. But it does not plan to lay off any full-time manufacturing employees — even if that means having a few more workers than it needs during its second shift.“We have really good people,” said Nick Perrino, the chief operating officer and a great-grandson of the company’s founder. “And we don’t want to let any of our team members go.”Despite a year of aggressive interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve aimed at taming inflation, and signs that the red-hot labor market is cooling off, most companies have not taken the step of cutting jobs. Outside of some high-profile companies mostly in the tech sector, such as Google’s parent Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, layoffs in the economy as a whole remain remarkably, even historically, rare.There were fewer layoffs in December than in any month during the two decades before the pandemic, government data show. Filings for unemployment insurance have barely increased. And the unemployment rate, at 3.4 percent, is the lowest since 1969.Layoffs Are Uncommonly Low More