Experts seem not to know what to make of the various numbers in Washington state and nationally. Employers added 4.5 million jobs in 2022, on top of 6.7 million in 2021. All that hiring was part of a powerful rebound from the pandemic recession of 2020. Technology companies have been laying off workers for months, with some, including Amazon, saying that they had hired too many people during the pandemic.
News has been plentiful about big tech company layoffs. Amazon has boosted its layoffs to 18,000 from an earlier announcement of 10,000. Cloud software provider Salesforce says it will cut 10% of its workers. And Facebook’s parent company Meta says it will shed 11,000. Smaller tech companies are also being hit. ESD paid unemployment insurance benefits to 58,587 people in December, an increase of 7,227 over the previous month. Winter layoffs in industries that rely on seasonal hires was a major contributor to this increase in paid claims in Washingto nstate.
The company Stitch Fix said that it is cutting 20% of its salaried workers. DoorDash has said it will eliminate 1,250 jobs. Washington’s economy added 14,000 jobs in December. Between November and December, the preliminary seasonally adjusted monthly unemployment rate fell to 4.5 percent.
Nationally, companies are continuing to add jobs across the economy, the unemployment rate fell from 3.6% to 3.5%, matching a 53-year low, the Labor Department said Friday. The December jobs report suggested that the labor market may be cooling in a way that could aid the Fed’s fight against high inflation. Last month’s gain was the smallest in two years, and it extended a hiring slowdown for most of 2022.
What’s more, average hourly pay growth eased in December to its slowest pace in 16 months. That slowdown could reduce pressure on employers to raise prices to offset their higher labor costs. Average hourly wage growth was up 4.6% in December from 12 months earlier, compared with a 4.8% year-over-year increase in November and a recent peak of 5.6% in March.
The picture for 2023 is much cloudier. Many economists foresee a recession in the second half of the year, a consequence of the Fed’s succession of sharp rate hikes. The central bank’s officials have projected that those increases will cause the unemployment rate to reach 4.6% by year’s end.
