Who's the boss in today's labor market?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

It's one thing to quit your job and a completely other thing to get laid off or fired. A new indicator compares quits with firings and layoffs to measure who has more power in today's labor market, workers or employers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.0	This is the Antichyde from Planet Money I'm Darian Woods.
0:14.9	I'm Whalen Wong and it is Jobs Friday!
0:18.6	It is!
0:20.6	The numbers for April are out today and the economy added 253,000 jobs.
0:25.9	That's quite a bit more than economists were expecting.
0:28.8	The unemployment rate basically stayed the same at 3.4%, and wage growth is still looking
0:34.0	steady.
0:35.0	Average hourly earnings are up 4.4% from a year ago.
0:38.8	And that got us thinking about the power struggle between employers and workers.
0:43.9	Because that's what we're seeing in these numbers.
0:45.9	This push and pull between workers and employers.
0:49.4	You've got workers pushing for higher wages or better conditions on the job.
0:54.3	And employers, well, they have their own priorities.
0:57.2	And that often means not raising wages as quickly as workers would like.
1:01.6	We've seen a lot of these power dynamics play out during the pandemic.
1:05.1	Today on the show, we meet an economist who came up with a new way to measure who has
1:09.7	more power, the worker or the employer.
1:12.6	It's right, the birth of a new indicator.
1:15.7	It's called the Labor Leverage Ratio.
1:18.6	After the break, we'll get into how this number is calculated and what it's telling us
1:22.3	about who's really the boss in today's labor market.
	...

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