The U.S. labor market has reached another milestone: For the first time in decades, there are more job openings than unemployed Americans who could fill them.
Vacancies rose to a fresh record of 6.7 million in April, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, released Tuesday by the Labor Department. More importantly, upward revisions to the prior month made it the first in government data back to 2000 that openings exceeded the number of unemployed. That gap, of 48,000 in March, grew to 352,000 in April and is poised to keep widening, as the number of unemployed has already dropped further in May.
Sho Chandra & Jeanna Smialek | Bloomberg