The U.S. Department of Labor has released its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, or the JOLTS report, for December 2014. There is a lag here to the traditional employment data, but the idea is to show what the actual state of the jobs market is beyond just the payrolls changes and the unemployment rate. December’s JOLTS report showed that there were 5.028 million job openings on the last business day of December.

While the Labor Department said this was little changed from the 4.847 million job openings the prior month, this is a solid gain from a year earlier when there were 3.914 million job openings. The rate of hires was 5.1 million and the rate of separations was 4.9 million. Within separations, the quits rate was 1.9% and the layoffs and discharges rate was 1.2%.

Here is why the openings matters so much. This was the highest level of job openings since January 2001. The job openings rate for December was 3.5%. Job openings increased for health care and social assistance and for state and local government. Job openings increased over the year for many industries: professional and business services, and health care and social assistance industries. More data as follows:

• Hires in December totaled 5.1 million, the highest level of hires since November 2007.
• Total separations in December were 4.9 million, the highest level of separations since October 2008.
• There were 2.7 million quits in December.
• Layoffs and discharges came to 1.7 million in December.
• There were 443,000 other separations for total nonfarm, the highest level of other separations since May 2006.

Over the 12 months ending in December 2014, hires totaled 58.3 million and separations totaled 55.4 million, yielding a net employment gain of 2.9 million.

It may seem odd to celebrate the rate of quits, but think about this for a second. When you quit a job it generally implies that you are moving up to a better job or moving into something more enjoyable or with more conveniences. You cannot have a healthy job market if people are not quitting to go elsewhere.

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