“Changed little” was the theme of February’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary released Tuesday — 7.6 million job openings, 5.4 million hires, both about the same as in January. 

The numbers of quits and layoffs also didn’t change appreciably, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

February’s numbers reflect the earliest layoffs of federal workers — tens of thousands. But overall, the data shows what looks like a steady, decent labor market.

One item in today’s report did catch our attention, though: Layoffs were up at the smallest of small businesses — ones with fewer than 10 workers.

Eric Saunders, owner of Carolina Landscaping and Cleanup near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, has just a couple full-time employees. And with major question marks over how much his customers are willing to spend these days, he sure isn’t hiring.

“Yeah, holding steady. Unless the market changes to where people aren’t so worried about every little cent they have, it’s kind of hard to do anything right now with laborers,” said Saunders. 

Holding steady in the face of uncertainty was kind of the theme of Tuesday’s JOLTS report, said Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist with Lightcast.

“Workers don’t want to go anywhere. Employers don’t want to hire. Everybody just freezes,” said Hetrick. 

Really small businesses, though, were laying off workers at a higher rate than anyone else. Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, said that’s an indicator to watch. Because even though firms with fewer than 10 workers represent just about one-eighth of total employment, “to me, their behavior is bellwether for overall trends in the economy,” she said. 

That’s because small firms have no choice but to respond quickly to a changing economy, Tcherneva said. 

“A small business owner really is working day to day, month to month,” she said. “They don’t have savings, liquidity, access to credit nearly to the same extent as a big company would.”

So when small businesses feel the need to cut costs, reducing workforce is a tempting lever to pull, said Lindsay Owens, executive director of progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.

“Our measures of small business uncertainty have skyrocketed. And so for me, it is no surprise at all that we’re starting to see the layoffs in small businesses,” Owens said.

But sentiment has soured among businesses of all sizes, said Guy Berger of economic research nonprofit The Burning Glass Institute. It’s just that “a large enterprise is like, we always joke, is a supertanker, right? It takes time to turn around,” Berger said. 

So changes to headcount might take an extra month or two to play out.