According to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover report released Tuesday, May 2 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. manufacturers reported 693,000 job openings in March 2023. That’s down by about 10,000 from the month previous and about 200,000 less than the 905,000 reported at the same time in 2022.
That trend mirrors the rest of the economy, which saw open posts fall about half a million to 9.5 million unfilled jobs. Across U.S. private enterprise, hires remained flat at 6.1 million and total separations rose by about 100,000 to 5.9 million.
Since the Covid pandemic, U.S. employers and manufacturers say talent has been hard to come by thanks to an employment environment that featured more open jobs than seekers. On a long-term scale, the year-over-year falling number of manufacturing job openings corresponds with a roughly 1:2 decrease in new hires—as job openings slid by about 200,000 from March 2022-March 2023, new hires only fell by 119,000, suggesting that companies are eliminating previously open positions.
The near-term data on separations reinforces that manufacturing companies might be cutting back. Preliminary data indicates that between February 2023 and March 2023, the number of manufacturing separations rose from 409,000 to 415,000, beating the number of manufacturing hires, which fell from 416,000 to 393,000 in the same timeframe, the first time that manufacturing has seen more separations than hires since April 2021, according to BLS archives.
And, despite increased reports of employee churn in manufacturing, the apparent increase in separations comes alongside a decrease in the rate of manufacturing employees quitting their jobs: The May 2 report estimates that 274,000 people quit their manufacturing jobs in March, roughly on par with the 277 thousand who quit the month previous.
That’s a bit higher than earlier this year—only 267,000 quit manufacturing jobs in January, so quits are elevated in the near term—but substantially lower than they were a year ago, when 339,000 people quit manufacturing jobs in March 2023, suggesting that employees are more circumspect now about leaving their factory jobs than they were a year ago.
