South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The latest version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that job openings remained scarce in May, the most recent month for which data are available.

There were 3.2 million job openings on the last business day of May 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The job openings rate was little changed over the month at 2.4 percent. The hires rate (3.4 percent) was little changed and the separations rate (3.1 percent) was unchanged. This release includes estimates of the number and rate of job openings, hires, and separations for the total nonfarm sector by industry and geographic region.
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Over the 12 months ending in May, the hires rate (not seasonally adjusted) rose for total nonfarm. The hires rate increased over the past 12 months in mining and logging, durable goods manufacturing, and federal government, and fell in wholesale trade. The hires rate increased over the year in the Midwest and South and was little changed in the other two regions.

From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the May data:

But even at 4.7-to-one, there remains a severe shortage of jobs. The ratio of unemployed per job opening is still substantially higher than at the worst point in the last recession, when it never went above 2.8 unemployed workers per job opening. In 2007, before the recession started, the ratio averaged 1.5-to-one.
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With so many unemployed workers per available job, people who find themselves out of work can be expected to remain unemployed for extremely long periods.  In May, nearly half (46%) of this country’s unemployed workers had been unemployed for over six months, 20 percentage points above the previous high of 26.0%, set in the summer of 1983.