Virginia’s tight labor market showed signs of easing up slightly in August.
The Virginia Employment Commission announced yesterday that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ August 2022 Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) reports that job openings in the Commonwealth decreased from July’s near-record high of 339,000 to 318,000.
Job quits also decline by 7,000 to 108,000 in August.
While the labor market appears to ease up in August in the Commonwealth less job openings and quits, United States jobs contracted by 10 percent. When taking into consideration that no hiring growth occurred during the same period, results imply that many of the jobs lost were not absent because they were filled in August, but because employers withdrew the positions.
“Virginia’s drop was milder and it’s important to note that the decline came off of many months of highly elevated levels. The number of workers quitting their jobs did decrease in Virginia but that alone doesn’t provide much evidence that workers were less confident in their ability to get another, better job if they quit,” a VEC press release stated.
More than 70 percent of separations in August remained quits, which indicates that employees in Virginia continue to have confidence in finding better positions. Layoffs and discharges remained low the month of August in Virginia and across the U.S.
While the BLS JOLTS data estimated that the number of August job openings in the U.S. decreased by more than 1 million, one of the larger one-month declines in the survey’s history, the decline was milder in the Commonwealth.
Less than one unemployed worker per two job openings was in the Commonwealth in August 2022, holding steady for the previous few months at 0.4. The lowest rates for unemployment were recorded since the BLS began collecting data in January 2001, according to a press release. Virginia’s unemployed per job opening ratio peaked at 4.4 unemployed per job opening in February 2010 during the Great Recession. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ratio peaked at 3.3 in April 2020.
Across the country, 10.1 million jobs were open and 6 million were unemployed in August 2022, resulting in an unemployed people to job ratio of 0.6, compared to 0.5 in July. The ratio has remained low since July 2021. August’s ratio is the first increase since April 2020, when the ratio was 4.9. The country’s highest unemployed to job ratio weas 6.4 in October 2009 because of the Great Recession.
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Rebecca Barnabi
