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Written by Keming Liang
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Sunday, 21 December 2008 00:00 |
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently announced that the nonfarm unemployment rate had reached at 15-year high, with the largest one-month drop in employment since 1974. Another survey by Bureau of Labor Statistics tells a less discouraging tale. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) collects data from employers and produces monthly estimates of job openings, hires, quits, layoffs, and discharges, and other separations. JOLTS data attempts to measure the demand for labor, and is a way to track the health of the employment market.
The following chart shows that we are losing people on the payrolls with fewer hires than total separations which include quits, layoffs and discharges. But hires have not reached the low experienced five years ago and jobs are still being created. And the separation number for the month does not seem scary at all. Instead, it is well within the acceptable range and seems below the average of recent years. 
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, seasonally adjusted, in thousands. The Demand for Labor gives a wider snapshot of the employment situation by estimating the positions that are available and not yet filled as well as hires. These benchmarks, which look at unmet demand, offer different views of the labor market from simply looking at the overall unemployment numbers. Although the labor demand is decreasing, there are still more than 3 million jobs to fill.
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