> Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard has spotted something “very unusual” in the labor market. The number of job openings remains high. But not enough peo

> Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard has spotted something “very unusual” in the labor market. The number of job openings remains high. But not enough people want to take these jobs, and the share of America’s population that either has a job or wants one, its rate of labor force participation, isn’t rising. The core premise of this article is flawed. There AREN'T more open positions than people looking for jobs, and of course there AREN'T people sitting at home totally content being jobless because they don't think jobs available aren't good enough. That doesn't pass common sense test. The way "open positions" are counted in IT is total BS and I don't see a reason why that should not be the case in any other industry. If you go through open positions on many job search engines (Indeed/LinkedIn/whatever) they are full of "dormant" positions that have been open for years and employers don't care to close, or job search engine wants to keep open and regularly update (to inflate list of open positions), or something employers opened "just in case", looking for a unicorn with 20 years of experience and ready to work for peanuts, or multiple positions opened by staffing companies chasing the same position opened by their customers, or any of other countless cases. If you count all these then sure, there are quite a few more than people looking for jobs, but if you ignore any BS positions that's completely different picture. Dept of Labor numbers are produced with JOLTS which is a phone survey of businesses but they likely suffer from similar issues. Now add thousands and thousands of older workers who normally would continue working at the same company until they retire but who were let go during the COVID (or recent layoffs) and now can't get hired since changing companies is more difficult as you get older (so NO, 40+ and 50+ olds did NOT "retire early", they just can't find jobs and don't even get counted as actively looking) and you'll get the job market which is very different with the picture painted by the official numbers. Again, this is IT-specific but I don't see it is any more different for any other industry (probably excluding hourly jobs in hospitality etc).