US Private Sector Hiring Rebounds After 5-Month Slowdown

America’s private sector added 143,000 jobs in September, rebounding following a five-month slowdown.

There was also wage growth, with annual pay rising 4.7% year over year, a slight decline, payroll solutions firm ADP said in a Wednesday (Oct. 2) press release, citing its National Employment Report.

“Stronger hiring didn’t require stronger pay growth last month,” ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson said in the release. “Typically, workers who change jobs see faster pay growth. But their premium over job-stayers shrank to 1.9%, matching a low we last saw in January.”

The information industry was the only sector that shed jobs during the month, the release said. The manufacturing sector added jobs for the first time since April. The biggest job gains came in the leisure and hospitality space (34,000) and construction (26,000).

Year-over-year pay increases for people staying in their jobs dipped to 4.7%. For people changing jobs, the decline was sharper, from 7.3% in August to 6.6% in September, according to the release.

ADP’s findings came one day after the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover report for August, which showed that workers are mostly opting to stay where they are. The number of “quits” was 3.1 million, the lowest reading since the fall of 2020.

“The puts and takes of the August report indicate that we’re coming off a low base of momentum,” PYMNTS wrote Tuesday (Oct. 1). “And the tepid pace of quitting signals a reversal of at least some of the sentiment that we had seen in our own PYMNTS Intelligence surveys, where 1 in 5 workers had said that they’d be looking to switch jobs in 2024.”

Inside that designation, 57% of Generation Zers reported that they would be likely to change jobs over the same timeframe.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “85% of Consumers Say Incomes Are Not Matching Inflation” found that 85% of consumers said increases in their paychecks have not kept up with the pace of higher pricing, while 82% said concerns about inflation were at the top of their lists of economic worries.

“That would have been enough to spur some looking around for new roles, but the recent decline in ‘quits’ indicates that there may be some reticence to make a jump until the job openings picture improves, or interest rates continue to come down, or savings go up (which would improve financial cash cushions),” PYMNTS wrote.

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