Labor Market
The U.S. labor market beyond the headline unemployment rate: who's working, how tight the market is, the slack the headline misses, and what a paycheck actually buys.
Macro Pulse shows the headline unemployment rate sitting at a historically low 4.3% — a labor market that looks, at a glance, mostly healed. This dashboard is the texture underneath that number, and it's more ambivalent.
Participation never fully recovered from the pandemic. The extraordinary worker bargaining power of 2021-22 — record job openings, record quits — has drained back out. The broad U-6 measure of underemployment has drifted back above its pre-COVID level. And the 31% rise in nominal wages since 2020 has been substantially eaten by the inflation shown one dashboard over. The headline says healed; the fuller picture says *settled, at a cost.*
This is the snapshot. COVID through the FRED lens is the deep dive into how the shock reshaped these series.
Market tightness — openings & quits
monthlyTwo JOLTS series that move together: job openings (employer demand) and quits (worker confidence to walk). Both hit records in 2021-22 — openings reached 7.5% in March 2022, quits 3.0% in November 2021, the height of the 'great resignation.' Both have since cooled to *below* their pre-COVID levels: openings to 4.1% (from 4.4% in Feb 2020), quits to 2.0% (from 2.3%). The bargaining power workers briefly held has largely drained back out.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Underemployment — U-6 vs the headline
monthlyU-6 counts the discouraged and the involuntarily part-time that the headline U-3 rate misses — it runs roughly double. It spiked to 22.9% in April 2020 (against the headline's 14.8%), fell to a record-low 6.6% by December 2022, and has since drifted up to 8.2%. The gap between the two lines is the slack that doesn't show up in the number most people quote.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Wages (nominal)
monthly$37.41/hour in April 2026, up from $28.54 in February 2020 — a 31% nominal rise in six years. But this is the nominal figure. Most of that gain was eaten by the post-2021 inflation shown one dashboard over in Macro Pulse; real average hourly earnings — what the paycheck actually buys — are close to flat over the same span.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Discussion of this dashboard
Threads here are about the dashboard as a whole — its framing, what's missing, whether the constituent indicators tell a coherent story. Per-indicator discussion lives under each panel above.
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61.8% in April 2026 — still below the 63.3% of February 2020, and well under the 66.8% peak of 2001. The COVID crash bottomed at 60.1% in April 2020, the lowest in the series; the recovery since has been real but only partial. The longer arc is structural: participation has trended down since the early-2000s peak as the population ages, and the pandemic accelerated a retirement wave that hasn't reversed.
@admin · 27 May 2026