The new figures, which look at openings across all sectors for that month, were released as part of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which was updated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday. The increase was anticipated after July’s JOLTS report showed the lowest level of job openings since March 2021.The increase signals that the Federal Reserve’s barrage of interest rate hikes is still not quite causing the country’s robust labor market to falter the way many expected.
The largest decreases/increases in job openings were in professional and business services, finance and insurance, state and local government education, and nondurable goods manufacturing. The"quits rate" measures the number of people who voluntarily left their jobs and includes those who left their previous employment for another job and people who quit but are confident they will soon find new employment, given the tightness in the labor market.
Despite recent declines in the number of job openings, openings are historically high and above where they were before the pandemic, when the unemployment rate was at 3.5%. The unemployment rate ticked up to 3.8% in August but has largely hovered around that ultralow 3.5% for most of the past year.