The flat headline
On the last business day of June there were 7.4 million job openings, a rate of 4.4 per cent. Hires were 5.3 million, a rate of 3.4 per cent, and total separations 5.4 million, also 3.4 per cent. All three were reported as little changed or unchanged from May.[1]
Two of those lines belong to different people. Quits were unchanged at 3.2 million, a rate of 2.0 per cent. Layoffs and discharges were unchanged at 1.8 million, a rate of 1.1 per cent. A quit is a worker deciding; a layoff is an employer deciding. Both rates sat exactly where they were.[1]
There were 7.4 million openings and 5.3 million hires in the same month. A vacancy is an employer's stated intention to hire and can sit on a careers page for a quarter; a hire is an event with a start date and a first payslip. Households live on the second number, and a report that leads with the first is describing an intention rather than an income.[1]
Where the openings moved
The flat total was built from moves in opposite directions. Openings rose by 97,000 in transportation, warehousing and utilities and by 39,000 in the federal government. They fell by 74,000 in wholesale trade and by 55,000 in nondurable goods manufacturing.[1]
A warehouse opening in one state does not reach a wholesale sales worker in another, and a federal posting does not reach someone leaving a food or paper plant. Sector totals that cancel each other out at the national level still leave particular people looking for particular work in places where the openings just closed.[1]
The way to test which reading is right is the quit rate, and it is available in the same release. If openings were genuinely being reallocated to sectors workers could reach, more of them would be leaving voluntarily to take those jobs, and the 2.0 per cent would have moved. It did not, in a month when layoffs also held at 1.1 per cent. The safest thing that can be said is that fewer people are being pushed out, and no more of them are choosing to walk.[1]