The proportion of American workers who quit their jobs in May reached the highest level in 17 years, a sign that more people are confident they can find a new job, likely at higher pay.
Businesses also advertised fewer jobs in May than the previous month, but the tally of open positions outnumbered the ranks of the unemployed for only the second time in the past two decades, the Labor Department said today.
The figures reflect a strong job market driven by optimistic employers seeking to expand their workforces. Last week’s jobs report showed that businesses hired workers at a healthy pace and the unemployment rate remained very low, at 4%.
The percentage of workers quitting their jobs reached 2.4% in May, the highest level since April 2001.
There were 6.64 million available jobs in May, down 3% from April’s figure of 6.84 million, which was the most in the nearly two decades that records have been kept. At the same time, there were just 6 million unemployed people in May.
Nick Bunker, an economist at the job-listing website Indeed, calculates that there are now just 0.91 unemployed workers for each available job, also the lowest on record.
The need to compete for such a small pool of workers should force companies to raise pay in order to fill their open jobs, yet pay gains remain modest.
“Companies are slowly but surely realizing that they have no choice but to be more flexible,”says Josh Howarth, president of the mid-Atlantic district for staffing firm Robert Half International. If an applicant fits with a company’s culture and is highly motivated to learn, businesses are now more willing to train new hires to help them gain needed skills.
