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The past several months have been dominated by headlines of layoffs at high-profile companies, particularly in the tech industry.
But Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. added 517,000 jobs in January, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest it’s been in five decades. In total, 5.7 million U.S. workers remain unemployed, the lowest number since 2000.
As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers noted in a tweet after the release of the jobs report on Friday morning: « Real America is getting back to work. »
« The labor market is pretty strong, » said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in an interview in advance of Friday’s report. « The unemployment rate is low, and there are still people who have not returned to the labor market after the pandemic, so we can expect the labor force can grow. But we’ve had an incredible couple of years of recovery. »
Additional data this week showed the strength of the jobs market: There remained more than 11 million job openings in the economy in December, and the weekly count of first-time filers for unemployment benefits has fallen to 183,000 — a nine-month low.
The jobs gains run counter to the announcements by some brand-name firms in Silicon Valley. A handful of tech companies, including Amazon, Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook-parent Meta, Salesforce, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter and others have cut thousands of jobs in recent months.
Layoffs are brutal life-altering events. But there is evidence that many of those who’ve lost their jobs have been able to secure new ones in a relatively short period of time.
A recent ZipRecruiter survey conducted in the last three months of 2022 found that more than half of recently hired workers found their job within a month of searching, and more than 4 in 5 found their job within three months.
