Job churn is up, but only in some parts of the U.S. – Marketplace

More than 3.3 million people quit their jobs in October. That number’s up 0.2% from the month before, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, out Tuesday.

Quitting can be a sign of a healthy economy: people feel like they can easily get another job, so they leave their current position. But those quitters aren’t evenly distributed around the country. In the American West, for example, the quits rate went up by more than 0.5% in October. Meanwhile, in the Northeast, the rate actually went down.

It’s a good time to be a transportation planner in Utah, said Lara McLellan, a former transportation planner for the Salt Lake City government.

“There is more work out there than folks doing the work,” she said.

In October, she quit and moved to a regional transit agency that covers a bigger chunk of the state. Her job is to plan for the long-term. 

“You know, the American West, and definitely Utah, is experiencing so much growth,” she said. “It’s exciting to be a part of an agency that does look decades out into the future.”

McLellan is part of what Christine McDaniel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, refers to as “churn”: workers leaving jobs and moving to positions that are better fits.

“You like to see a lot of churn to the labor market, because it means that people are getting matched up with the jobs that they can really excel in,” she said.

McDaniel said churn happens when there’s a lot of quitting along with a lot of hiring and job openings.

This is the case right now in the western U.S., which McDaniel describes as “booming.”

Still, nationally, today’s churn isn’t the churn of 2021. Or even a year ago, when there were higher levels of quits, hires and openings. 

“This is sort of a cooling off after the kind of the frenzy of the pandemic,” said Kristina Sargent, an economics professor at Middlebury College.

She said this cooling isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It helps keep inflation under control. And it’s a return to a job market that looks more like it did before the pandemic. 

“Overall, it’s kind of boring, right? We’re going back to a normal — there’s not like a ton of churn happening, there’s not a lot of moving in and out. But that’s okay.”

Sometimes you want to change everything up. And sometimes, she said, you wanna just do the job that’s in front of you.