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- The latest data on hiring, quits, and layoffs paints a picture of how some industries are faring.
- Right now, the Great Resignation is still strong in many blue-collar, service industries.
- But the Great Resignation is coming to an end in remote, knowledge-based roles.
If you're in an industry that desperately staffed up during the pandemic, your days of easily being able to throw in the towel and pick up a new job might be winding down.
The latest data release on employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that, while job gains in February were more robust than economists anticipated, some sectors saw a slowdown. In particular, transportation and warehousing — which saw a big pandemic-era boom as delivery services of all kinds skyrocketed in popularity amid store closures and lockdowns — lost jobs. Information, which encompasses some tech roles, also saw employment decline from January to February.
It's a clear reversal in the sectors that desperately tacked on roles during the pandemic, and signals that the Great Resignation may have finally come to a close for the pandemic's boom industries.
"Increasingly, the expectation for 2023 is that we are on track for a two-track economy," Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, told Insider. "If you are a skilled vocational worker or a frontline service worker, the labor market continues to be very tight, but it's clearly a lot softer for knowledge workers."
The following chart shows which industries saw monthly increases or decreases in their employment level:
The information sector not only saw a decline in employment in February, but also in December and January, which both also featured big overall job gains in the broader economy.
"I think what we're seeing there is just sort of the result of a lot of the pullback in that sector," Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed Hiring Lab, told Insider.
Bunker noted that tech also makes up a "relatively small share of employment." Even so, the layoffs there have "been unwinding of a lot of that pandemic-era strength in that sector," he added.
Many of the different sectors within professional and business services saw a monthly increase in payrolls — but computer systems design and related services wasn't one of them, showing another divergence between tech and other parts of the economy.
It's yet another example of the contradictions of the post-vaccine, post-recession economic recovery
While it's true that sectors like professional and business services — which includes part of the tech industry — saw noticeable layoffs in January, those aren't widespread yet. Workers in those so-called knowledge industries, which were desperate to hire and offer ever-higher salaries, might be experiencing what their counterparts in blue-collar industries saw at the onset of the pandemic.
"In some respects, it is a reversal of the pattern that we saw for much of the past 20 years. You have to worry that it is a temporary reversal of that pattern," Terrazas said. "Of course, leisure and hospitality, to some degree, depends on incomes and spending everywhere else in the labor market."
The employment data comes after the Bureau of Labor Statistics's latest accounting of quits and layoffs, which gauged how many workers were leaving in January. That data suggests a lower number of workers quitting than in the past few months, especially in information and professional and business services, but still notable upticks in retail and leisure and hospitality.
Professional and business services saw 498,000 quits in January. That's a major drop from previous months, and as Terrazas told Insider, "the quit rate really collapsed."
In the information sector, the quits rate stood at 1.3% in January, below February 2020's 1.6%. "That's definitely a spot where the labor market has cooled, and workers are quitting less often because there's just fewer opportunities," Bunker said.
"If you read about the Great Resignation while you were working from home on a computer, in your pajamas, the Great Resignation's over," Terrazas said. "If you still went into work or had to be outside, I think the music is still playing for job seekers."
In industries like retail and leisure and hospitality, the Great Resignation lives on. Bunker said "there's lots of strength in turnover" in both of those sectors.
But whether the labor market outlook will stay rosy for some and not others is unclear. Terrazas said we've seen this story before, where turmoil is initially very concentrated, but then there's linkages to other sectors under the surface.
"We saw that in 2008 with respect to housing and finance," he said. "We saw that in 2020 with respect to supply chains and transportation."
Right now, the slowing labor market is "narrowly isolated" to some risk-intensive sectors, he said. What's unclear is how long that will last.
Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh isn't so concerned, though.
"I'm really not worried long term about that," he told Insider. "Those sectors will bounce back and most of the folks that have been laid off in tech companies, their unemployment is such a short period of time because so many companies are looking for tech people."
Do you work in an industry that grew during the pandemic and is now seeing job losses? Reach out to these reporters at jkaplan@insider.com and mhoff@insider.com.