Many blue-collar workers are riding into 2024 on a year’s worth of stronger hiring, more plentiful job opportunities and faster pay growth than some of their white-collar counterparts. After two years of rapid growth, the United States’ job market is finally slowing down as 2023 draws to a close, but Americans broadly continue to benefit from its strengths. Unemployment clocked in at 3.7% last month , the 22nd straight month when the jobless rate has held below 4%. People also appear to be working or looking for jobs at higher levels than before the pandemic, with 83.3% of those between the prime ages of 25 to 54 participating in the labor force. But with job gains slowing from an average of 399,000 a month over the course of last year to 232,000 so far this year, workers’ historic surge in bargaining power during the post-pandemic rebound is now on the wane. A top culprit: higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve meant to quell inflation, which peaked in summer 2022 above 9% and is now hovering around 3% . A tale of two job markets While job postings in white-collar fields like marketing and software development have cooled, the construction and nursing job markets have stayed strong. A line chart that shows how job listing volume is changing since February 2020 for four select sectors: construction, marketing, nursing, and software development. A fifth line represents the total volume of job listings on Indeed’s platform and serves as a control. Immediately, at the beginning of the pandemic, job listing volumes fall across all four sectors. However, as the listing volume increases during economic recovery, software job listings surge far above the rest. Around, the second half of 2022, listing volume begins to fall in software development and marketing, but remains […]
Click here to visit source. Blue-collar hiring and pay gains stay hot in a cooling job market