Washington (awp/afp) – Private companies in the United States created far fewer jobs than expected in November, also posting the steepest slowdown in nearly two years compared to October, according to the monthly ADP/Stanford Lab survey released Wednesday, two days ahead of official employment data.
In November, 127,000 jobs were created by private companies in the United States, up from 239,000 last month, and while analysts were expecting between 190,000 and 200,000, according to various consensus.
The economic slowdown caused by the US central bank, the Fed, to counter high inflation, seems to be starting to take effect.
“Inflection points can be hard to capture in the labor market, but our data suggests that Federal Reserve tightening is having an impact on job creation and wage gains,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist of ADP., mentioned in the press release.
He also specifies that “fewer people are quitting and the post-pandemic recovery is stabilising”.
However, the situation is not uniform, with large differences depending on the sector of activity.
Due to the sharp rise in interest rates, the most sensitive sectors have been hit the hardest. Manufacturing destroyed 100,000 jobs last month and housing construction lost 2,000.
On the contrary, the sectors that had been severely penalized since the beginning of the pandemic are recovering: the leisure and hotel industry thus created 224,000 jobs in November.
Wages rose 7.6% year-on-year, up from 7.7% in October.
The ADP/Stanford Lab report is seen as a barometer of official November jobs data, which will be released on Friday. The unemployment rate is expected to remain stable at 3.7%, with fewer jobs being created than in October, at 200,000 versus 261,000.
The Great Renunciation slows down
The labor market has been very tense for a year and a half and the ball is in the workers’ court. Indeed, they can take advantage of the labor shortage to change jobs and thus benefit from better conditions, particularly in terms of wages.
But this situation should not last, because the fight against high inflation should also weigh on employment.
Especially as the tech sector, which had greatly benefited from the pandemic and taken over with a vengeance, is now experiencing a reversal of fortune. Several Silicon Valley companies, such as Meta, Twitter, Lyft, and HP, recently announced significant workforce reductions.
Another sign that the situation is changing, the number of job offers fell again at the end of October, with 10.3 million unfilled positions, against 10.7 million at the end of September, the office announced on Wednesday American statistician.(BLS ) in its JOLTS report.
This is a little less than the expected 10.5 million.
And in October, 4 million resignations were recorded, a slight decrease.
“Large resignations continue to slow as the job market eases, even as resignations (like job vacancies) remain at a very high level compared to pre-pandemic levels,” economist Daniel wrote on Twitter. Zhao from the Glassdoor job search site.
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