(Chart by Economic Policy Institute)
In light of this morning's news about first-time claims for unemployment benefits, another survey released this week deserves mention: the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report.
The data have only been gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 11 years. That limits their overall usefulness. But what they show is that the number of job openings across the nation in October dropped by 110,000. In case you're wondering, the BLS derives the JOLTS report from a random sampling of 16,000 businesses. It includes both part-time and full-time openings and makes no distinction between them.
The October numbers mean there is one job slot for every 4.25 men and women looking for work. Things were slightly better in September. But, as the chart above shows, the situation has been miserable a long time. For 34 consecutive months there have been at least four out-of-work Americans for every job opening. When the series began in December 2000, the ratio was what now feels like a miraculous 1.1 to 1. But that was the Clinton boom.
It's been much worse recently. At one point in the summer of 2009, the figure was 6.9 to 1. But the improvement hasn't made things easier for the three out of four people for whom there simply are no jobs.
As Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute writes:
There are 5.7 million people in this country who have been unemployed for more than half a year, up from 1.2 million in 2007. Of course, the reason for this is not that these millions of workers have become lazy, unskilled, or unproductive; it is that there are not enough jobs available. This is no time to cut the number of weeks of benefits, as the House of Representatives appears ready to do. With the Congressional Budget Office projecting an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent at the end of next year, continuing federally funded unemployment insurance benefit extensions through 2012 would extend a lifeline to the families of millions of long-term unemployed workers, and generate spending that would support well over half a million jobs.
Lose those half-million jobs as the policies being pushed by Republicans would do, and the JOLTS ratio would be back to five job-seekers for every opening.
If you are desirous of a more detailed discussion of JOLTS, with more charts, you can find one here by Robert Oak at the Economic Populist.