The Surprising Reason Why There Are Now More Job Openings Than Unemployed Workers

As we reported yesterday, for the first time in history, the number of job openings in the US (6.7MM) has surpassed the official number of unemployed workers (6.1MM).

And yet something about that number does not make sense.

When we reported on the jobs number back on June 1, we observed that the number of people not in the labor force has risen to nearly 96 million, and while much of this is due to demographics, and the America's "opioid" epidemic, a lot can be assigned to an increasingly inefficient labor market that lacks dynamism. Subsequent deep dives into the jobs number show us that the health of the job market may not be on a par with where it was back in 2006 , and that the job market "health" may be judging a book by its cover.

One such indicator to note is the amount of churn that occurs between jobs: churn is supposed to give an indication of how active participants in the workforce are in looking for better opportunities than the ones they currently have. In a market where there was recently more job openings than there were unemployed people to fill them, as was reported by the Wall Street Journal, one would expect churn to be at, or exceeding, levels it has previously been at during times of a "healthy" economy.

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