For Immediate Release: Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Contact: Phoebe Silag or Donte Donald, news@epi.org 202-775-8810
Job-seekers ratio held steady in September
September’s Job-Seekers Ratio, the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings, was unchanged from the revised August ratio of 3.4-to-1. In her analysis, EPI economist Heidi Shierholz explains what September’s hiring data reveal about the overall state of the labor market. Though up significantly since the official start of the recovery in June 2009, hiring dropped by 255,000 in September and remains 19.4 percent below its 2007 average. While this drop in hiring is most likely the result of month-to-month variation in the data and not a reversal of the economy’s slow-but-steady upward trend, it still underscores the ongoing rocky nature of the recovery and how far we have to go.
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