More workers are losing “permanent” jobs. Should we be worried?
More workers are losing “permanent” jobs. Should we be worried?
Plenty of jobs data will come out this week — including the November national employment report, due Friday. One item to keep an eye on in that release: the number of permanent job losers. That’s people who weren’t temporarily laid off but instead have been let go or laid off permanently from a particular position.
In October, the number of permanent job losers crept above 1.8 million. That’s the highest it’s been since November 2021.
Mia Trujillo had been working without a break for three decades, most recently at a big tech company. But this year, her whole team was laid off.
“I don’t think anybody ever expects it to happen to them,” she said.
Trujillo treated the break as a kind of sabbatical. She traveled, caught up on sleep, finished books instead of abandoning them part of the way through.
She’s planning to rev up her job search in January and hopes to land at a smaller tech company. “You can kind of see your impact a little bit more directly on the work,” she said.
Tech workers have been hit harder than others, said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute. But many of them are able to find new jobs.
“We know that their unemployment rate is slightly higher than it was, but it’s still relatively low,” he said.
Hershbein pointed out that the number of permanent job losers comes to just over 1% of the labor force.
“That’s slightly higher than it was right after the pandemic,” he said. “But it’s also right about where it was in 2017 or 2007 or 1997, which were hardly bad years in the labor market.”
Also, when seasoning the October jobs report, add more salt than usual. There were strikes and storms that soured things that month.
“I think it’s a potential worrisome trend if it continues for several more months,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics at Penn State Abington.
He said if the labor market continues to add jobs at the rate it has been, then those losers will be winners soon enough. But if it doesn’t, Golden said, more of them could stay unemployed for a longer time.
“It can hurt workers’ earnings permanently and therefore undermine their spending and undermine the well-being of a segment of our workforce,” he said.
Tech worker Mia Trujillo said her job search will probably take longer than she’d like. And she’s ready for the prep to be kind of intense this time because, she said, a lot has changed in technology, even in the last year.
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