Category: Employment

As the labor market continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, many firms have had trouble finding and retaining workers. This is a sign of a strong labor market where firms need to compete to find the workers they need. One way to understand this issue is to look at the trend of labor market […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their monthly report on the employment situation in February today. The report highlighted a substantial increase in payroll employment of 678,000 new jobs and a reduction of the unemployment rate to 3.8 percent. These numbers highlight a continued strengthening of the labor market in February. This followed strong […]

The employment page of the Clemson Economic Trends website has an updated link to graphs of unemployment in each county in South Carolina compared with the state unemployment rate. The plots are useful to understand how the strength of the labor market varies across the state. Among the largest three counties in the state, Greenville […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the employment situation for January 2022, showing that payroll employment increased by 467,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate remained nearly constant at 4.0 percent. This strong growth in jobs occurred despite the survey being conducted at the peak of the spike in Omicron cases during […]

This week the BLS released the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for November and the Employment Situation for December this week. Together, these reports provide an updated look at the status of the labor market. Given that the reports reflect data from the end of November and the week containing December 12th, respectively, […]

Here are a few notes from the economic news this week: The BLS reported that consumer prices continued to rise at a rapid pace in November. The inflation rate rose to 6.8 percent over the previous 12 month period, the highest rate since 1982. Energy and new automobiles are the categories with the largest increases, […]

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the employment situation report for November. The data showed that the US economy added 210,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate declined to 4.2 percent from 4.6 percent in October. While the number of new jobs was below expectations of another month of over 500,000, the report shows […]

The BLS released their report describing the employment situation in October 2021. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States increased by 531,000 jobs beating forecasts of around 450,000 jobs for the month. This strong report breaks a two-month trend of disappointing jobs numbers and signals that the economic recovery from the pandemic is again gaining […]

The BLS reported that payroll employment in the United States increased by 194,000 jobs in September. This was the second straight month with jobs growth coming in below expectations. The slower than expected growth in employment likely reflects the effect of the delta variant delaying the return of many workers to the labor market. The […]

The Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) released a report showing that the economy had 10.9 million job openings on July 31. This was a new record high for the data series. To put this number in perspective it is helpful to compare the number of job openings with the number of unemployed workers. […]