“The economically relevant question is: Is it happening in a large enough scale to be driving anything? We still have officially unemployed workers far outstripping job openings,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, a former DOL chief economist during the Obama administration. “In just numbers, there are not enough job openings to go around right now, period. That’s the key thing that’s keeping us from putting more workers back to work.”
Wage growth — usually a sign that employers are competing to find workers — has been unchanged at 3.4 percent since December. And the number of people looking for work on the job-search platform Joblist has increased 10 percent so far in April, according to data provided to POLITICO.
Shierholz also points to the 916,000 new jobs added in the March jobs report as evidence that people are returning to work.
“That was extraordinary job growth, which is hard to square with really loud calls of ‘I can’t find the workers I need’ when over 900,000 people managed to get hired,” she said.