Churn goes the labor market

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Unemployment filings and layoffs are rising, and private sector hiring hit a two-year low, recent reports show. Is it just healthy turnover or should we be worried about the direction the labor market is headed? For now, analysts are split. Also in this episode: Reddit sues an AI firm for scraping its user data and Kai spends more time in Utah County with ADP’s Nela Richardson exploring the obstacles and opportunities that come with a young population.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, and thanks for listening. We want to know more about our audience. So stick around at the end of the episode to hear about how you can provide feedback and potentially walk away with a $75 gift card.
0:12.9	On the program today, some jobs data, a little political economy, also trampolines from American public media. This is Marketplace.
0:29.2	In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzball. It is Thursday, today the 5th of June. Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:40.3	One of the fun things you do as a business and economics reporter is try to figure out from the data you have what the data you're going to get is going to be.
0:50.6	I say that with an eye toward the calendar, which tells me that tomorrow we're going to get the May jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
0:57.8	We have in hand, as of this morning, the regular weekly data we get on people making first-time claims for unemployment benefits.
1:05.0	247,000 was the number, which is pretty much in the range of where it's been over the past year or so.
1:11.0	However, comma, and with an eye toward tomorrow's jobs report,
1:15.1	layoffs are in the air.
1:16.8	Another round reported at Microsoft earlier this week.
1:19.2	It's second in as many months.
1:21.4	Procter & Gamble said today it's making cuts to 7,000 jobs, about 15%.
1:26.2	This morning, Challenger Gray and Christmas, the oft-sighted
1:29.9	outplacement firm, told his companies announced just shy of 700,000 job cuts between January 1st
1:36.5	and the end of May. That's 80% more than the same period last year. All in all, the
1:42.1	numbers suggest a rising amount of what economists
1:44.8	call labor churn, which is where marketplace's Stephanie Hughes comes in. People enter and leave
1:50.6	the workforce all the time. They graduate and get a job or quit their current position and start a
1:55.2	new one. Maybe they retire or get laid off. All of this turnover is labor churn. And UBS economist Jonathan Pingle says in a healthy economy, you can think of it as being a kind of matchmaker.
2:07.3	The more churn there is in some sense, you know, the better kind of match you're going to find when you're looking for work or employers looking for you.
2:13.8	As individuals, we think of getting laid off as being really bad.
2:18.2	But Pingel says layoffs are also a regular part of the economic cycle.
	...

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