WASHINGTON (AP) – The disconnect is jarring: Across the United States, employers who are desperate to fill jobs have posted a record-high number of job openings. They’re raising pay, too, and dangling bonuses to people who accept job offers or recruit their friends.
And yet millions more Americans are unemployed compared with the number who were jobless just before the viral pandemic flattened the economy a year and a half ago.
The puzzling mismatch is a reflection of an unsettled economy – one that all but shut down at the height of the pandemic, then bounced back with unexpected speed and strength thanks to the rollout of vaccines and vast infusions of government spending. And now the economic outlook has been clouded yet again by a resurgence of COVID-19 cases linked to the highly contagious delta variant.
On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that employers posted 10.9 million job openings in July – the most on records dating to 2000. For job-seekers, the abundance of vacancies is a welcome occurrence. Yet the magnitude of unfilled job openings poses a potential problem for the economy, especially if it persists over the long run: Companies that are short of employees can’t capitalize on a surge in consumer demand, thereby hampering economic growth.
The unprecedented demand for workers is happening even while 8.4 million Americans are unemployed, up from 5.7 million in February 2020. And the economy is still 5.3 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic paralyzed the United States.