


click for larger chart

via David A. Rosenberg & Gluskin Sheff



Dave adds:


Category: Wages & Income


11 Responses to “JOLTS: 7 Applicants Per Job Opening”

  1. nofoulsontheplayground says:

    The drop off the 2008-09 highs on that chart is a falling wedge in T/A parlance. If it breaks to the norm (up), the ratio in that chart will head up towards 8 and possibly higher soon.

  2. Petey Wheatstraw says:

    The clearing price for labor is less than a Chinese or Indian makes. Welcome to the (Corporatist) American (wet) dream.

  3. socaljoe says:

    Looks like for the last 2 years the trend is down.

    If it stays on trend, we’ll be back to the mean in about 3 years.

    I don’t see political cover for QE3, unless the trend heads back up.

  4. tenaciousd says:

    Interesting. Is there a similar non-proprietary source for this type of statistic?

  5. tenaciousd says:

    Duh. As soon as I ask the question, I Google it and find it. EPI has a chart and you can get the BEA data in Excel. Enjoy.

  6. PrahaPartizan says:

    Since all jobs clear at the marginal rate, all corporations should fire all of their staff and then hire back whomever at whatever “wage” they want to pay. I’m sure that if the corps could figure out how to do that simultaneously so that they wouldn’t be cherry-picked without violating anti-trust law they would do it. Hell, they might do it anyway and challenge the government to sue them. By the time the Roberts Court got finished distorting the law to rule in favor of the corps, we’d be ten years down the road and nobody would care anymore.

  7. willid3 says:

    PrahaPartizan, don’t say that . they might actually do it.
    its really sort of self defeating. as they cut wages, they end up having to cut their prices as they find out their customers can’t buy at the original price any more. which defeats the purpose of cutting wages to begin with. and now we see one of the main sources of deflation. its also what they actually found out with offshoring. they got all of a 15% cut in wage cost at the end of the process, usually got less done too, but then they found them selves having to cut their prices even more as they lost more and more customers that would buy.

  8. rktbrkr says:

    Consultants used to come in and recommend that management fuck with the heads of non-union workers by making them apply for the jobs they currently held and use this a tool to dump people they didn’t like.I don’t think thats as popular anymore maybe too many people they did like found better jobs using the resumes they had to make up for consultants games.

  9. rktbrkr says:

    Henry Ford used to pay his workers enough for them to afford to buy a Ford, that kind of progressive thinking doesn’t fit into today’s quarter by quarter management style

  10. Robespierre says:

    @rktbrkr Says:


    Henry Ford was very ambitious wanting to build a global automobile empire. Current management have no such ambition. Their goal is to build a quarter by quarter bonus empire even if it sinks the company. There is your different very ambitious visionaries and well scoundrels.

  11. willid3 says:

    and Henry Ford knew that if he paid them enough to buy the car, that there would be sales. which wasn’t the majority of thinking then. then as now, they were more inclined to the pay a pittance, and require a lot to but what was made. and they had real trouble finding buyers. and in a lot of ways, we have regressed to that time. we just haven’t gotten to the point where employers are killing employees. or outsourcing that to their government henchmen (the national guard. the police. or even the marines or army. they have each done this at least once)