With tomorrow being Thanksgiving and all, first-time unemployment filings came in Wednesday, a day early. Weekly claims came in at a seven-month low.
Pit that against private payroll data out Tuesday from ADP saying job loss has picked up, and the September jobs report out last week giving better-than-expected numbers, and the job market seems kind of all over the place.
A phrase that’s been used to describe this job market is low-hire, low-fire.
Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said employers aren’t expanding or contracting. “And while that’s true, I think that’s a little deceptive because it sounds very chilled out, right?” she said.
Chilled out. Try telling that to someone who’s unemployed and has been filling out applications for six months (the length of an average job search these days, said Shrivastava). Try telling that to a worker who’s unhappy but doesn’t see many job openings to apply for.
The truth is, the job market is only “chilled out” if you’re in one of a few industries.
“You’re probably pretty chill if you’re looking for a job in health care,” she said. It’s one area contributing to job growth.
Now, all this stillness is unusual. A low-hire job market tends to go with a high unemployment rate. The last measure was relatively low, at 4.4%.
Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said this stall out makes predicting the future difficult.
“I have less-than-usual confidence that I understand what’s going on just because it’s hard to parse what’s going on,” he said.
Even Rothstein’s go-to indicators are messy. For instance, he’d usually look at how younger workers are doing, as they tend to be the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.
“The canary isn’t doing great, but is that because of AI or is that because just overall the labor market is weakening?” he said.
Meanwhile, new policies that influence the labor market are a mixed bag, said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University.
“Things have to calm down a little bit,” he said.
New tax laws, tariffs, federal workforce reductions, immigration crackdowns. “As long as all of those factors are bubbling and moving in different directions we might stay in this place for a while,” Holzer said.
For employers to feel confident in expanding their businesses and hiring, they need to feel more certain about the future, said Shrivastava at Indeed.
“You can’t wake up tomorrow with certainty. Certainty has to be kind of built in,” she said.
Building in certainty requires policy consistency. And by definition, consistency requires time.