Job quitters on the march as Sept. hirings rise

More workers quit their jobs in September as hires reached their highest level in nearly seven years, the Labor Department said Thursday.

Hires increased to a seasonally adjusted 5 million, a level last seen in December 2007. Quits rose to a seasonally adjusted 2.8 million in September from 2.5 million in the previous month.

Both measures offer more evidence of an improving labor market that has gained an average of nearly 229,000 jobs a month this year. Last week, the Labor Department reported employers added 214,000 jobs in October as the unemployment rate fell to 5.8%, the lowest in more than six years.

Thursday's government data on quits and hires from Labor's Job Openings and Labor Turnover, or JOLTS, report, suggests that more workers are gaining confidence to quit jobs in search of new ones — and that employers are moving faster to fill openings.

"If you feel secure enough to quit your job, then the economy must be pretty good," says Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist of MUFG Union Bank.

Not all of the numbers in Thursday's report were stronger. Job openings fell by 118,000 from August to a seasonally adjusted 4.7 million, but that's still the third-highest level since early 2000, Labor figures show.

Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says job seekers still outnumber openings 2 to 1. A full jobs recovery awaits a still lower number of layoffs and a higher rate of hiring, she said in posts on the EPI's blog Thursday.

September's 3.6% hires rate — that's the number of hires as a share of total employment — is up from earlier this year but still below pre-recession levels, Gould says. The rate averaged 3.8% from 2000 through December 2007, when the recession started.

First-time claims for unemployment benefits are a barometer of layoffs, and they have been running at or near 14-year lows.

In a separate report Thursday, the Labor Department said initial weekly applications for unemployment rose 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 290,000. The four-week average, which smooths out volatility in the weekly numbers, increased slightly to 285,000.

"This increase is nothing to worry about; seasonal quirks pointed clearly to an increase, and we are relieved the number was not higher," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, told the Associated Press. He projected that at the current pace of unemployment applications, the U.S. economy should add roughly 250,000 jobs net each month.