The number of people leaving the workforce hit a new record in November, according to data released Tuesday by the Department of Labor.
About 4.5 million workers quit their jobs in November, up from 4.2 million the month before. The number is the highest since the United States began keeping records of the statistic about two decades ago. The figure is equivalent to about 3% of the workforce.
The so-called quits rate measures the number of people who voluntarily left their jobs and includes those who left their previous employment for another job and people who quit but are confident they will soon find new employment, given the tightness in the labor market.
“Workers continued to quit their jobs at a historic rate,” Indeed Hiring Lab’s Director of Research Nick Bunker said Tuesday.
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“The low-wage sectors directly impacted by the pandemic continued to be the source of much of the elevated quitting,” he said. “For example, the quits rate was 6.9% for accommodation and food services. Lots of quits means stronger worker bargaining power, which will likely feed into strong wage gains.”
The number of job openings decreased from the month before, with about 10.6 million openings in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Job openings decreased by the largest margin in the accommodation and food services space, followed by construction and nondurable goods manufacturing. Openings increased in finance and insurance and with the federal government.
One factor worth noting is that the employment survey was conducted largely before the omicron variant of COVID-19 began to surge across the U.S. and the world. It is unclear to what extent the variant will affect the economy and the number of job openings going into the new year, although new cases are increasing by a large margin daily.
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“While each successive wave of the pandemic caused less economic damage, there is still a risk to the labor market from the current surge of cases. Hopefully any disruption is temporary and minimal because the outlook for 2022 is strong,” Bunker said.
