All right, give me a four-letter word for this economy, would you?

Here's mine.

J-O-B-S.

From American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Monday today. Somehow it is the first of June. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We are going to learn over the next, what, one, two, three, four days in this economy. A whole lot about the state of the American

labor market. The April jolts will be upon us tomorrow. That's the job openings and labor

turnover survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We'll get first time claims for unemployment

benefits on Thursday. That is not an A-list indicator, but it can give us some good context.

And then Friday, the biggie non-farm payrolls is what the BLS calls it.

The jobs report is what the rest of us say.

And it will include, among a whole lot of interesting data, how much people are getting paid.

That's all the more relevant now because back in April, inflation outpaced wage growth for the first time in three years.

Daniel Ackerman gets us going with what's what with worker wages.

Of course, everyone wants their pay to keep up with inflation.

But Luzaina Abdalwahad, head of economic research at Ravellia Labs, says there's a tough reality in the labor market right now.

Workers aren't in a very good negotiating position.

She says there just aren't a ton of job openings.

For like two years consistently, the hiring and separation rates are going down and down.

So if there aren't that many opportunities for workers, then it's going to be

really hard for them to try to negotiate a pay increase. That's a very different situation from the

inflation spike of 2021 and 22, says Betsy Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan.

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