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The numbers: Job openings in the U.S. fell slightly to 6.9 million in February just a month before the coronavirus upended the economy and all but certainly ended the longest expansion in American history.
Available jobs are expected to sustain a record decline in March, when large parts of the U.S. economy began to shut down to slow the spread of COVID-19. More than 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the last two weeks of March alone.
A little over a year ago, job openings had climbed to the highest level on record at 7.5 million.
Read:The U.S. officially lost 701,000 jobs in March, but in reality millions vanished
What happened: Total job openings slipped to 6.9 million in February from 7 million in January, the Labor Department said Tuesday.
Hiring rose in manufacturing and retail and was little changed in other major industries. Some 5.9 million people were hired in February and 5.56 million were laid off, fired, retired or died — what economists call “separations.”
Read: Trillions in coronavirus spending could explode deficits to World War II levels
Few if any industries will show an increase in hiring in March and layoffs could triple from February’s numbers. Big and small companies across the country have laid off or furloughed millions of workers to try to weather the oncoming recession.
A closely followed measure that tracks when workers leave one job for another, known as the quits rate, slipped to 2.5% from 2.6%.
Not many workers are going to quit voluntarily in the next several months with the economy taking a shellacking. The quits rate could fall to a record low, sliding below the 1.4% nadir during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.
See: MarketWatch Economic Calendar
Big picture: The level of job openings doesn’t reveal anything about the crisis at hand, but it will stand as a monument to just how good the labor market was before the viral outbreak. Job openings hovered near record highs and layoffs and unemployment were at a 50-year low.
It could be at least a year — if not a lot longer — before those high-water marks are approached again.
Read:Coronavirus has capsized the economy and it’sl sinking to even lower depths
What they are saying? “The data are certainly out of date, but this report is useful for understanding where we were before the crisis hit and to where we want to get back,” said Nick Bunker, director of research at Indeed Hiring Lab.
Market reaction: The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.52% and S&P 500 SPX, +1.11% rose in Tuesday trades for the second day in a row on the hope that the peak of the pandemic may soon be approaching.
