People Start to Worry About Their Jobs

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 20, 7:15AM EDT

People Start to Worry About Their Jobs — © PeopleImages / Getty Images

24/7 Wall St. Insights

The New York Federal Reserve has affirmed the view that the labor market has weakened.
It may not set off alarm bells yet, but it is cause for concern.
Also: Dividend legends to hold forever.

After two years during which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed unemployment below 4%, the jobless rate rose to 4.3% in July. Some economists viewed this as the start of a weak labor market. Data from the New York Federal Reserve affirmed that view.

The July 2024 SCE Labor Market Survey showed employment data was softening: “The proportion of individuals who reported searching for a job in the past four weeks rose to 28.4 percent from 19.4 percent in July 2023, marking the highest reading since March 2014.” There are two ways to read this. Either people believe they can find better jobs, or they worry their current employment is threatened. It is the second of these, unemployment may rise soon, because people see themselves as possible targets.

People who were satisfied with the chance they could get a promotion dropped 9.3 percentage points to 44.2%, which is a significant move. Once again, if the jobs market was robust, more people would be likely to think their employers would give them better advancement opportunities.

There is a temptation to read too much into a single set of numbers. However, CNBC points out that “Those who expected to become unemployed rose to 4.4%, a 0.5 percentage point increase from a year ago and the highest in the survey’s history.” That, by itself, would seem to be a warning.

Unemployment has not risen enough to set off alarm bells. However, if the BLS’s August unemployment rate rises to 4.5%, there will be reason for real anxiety.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.