US JOLTS Report – Is it the boomers?

Yesterday the US Jolts reported,

Job openings were little changed at 10.4 million on the last business day of September. Hires and total separations were little changed at 6.5 million and 6.2 million, respectively. The quits level and rate increased to a series high of 4.4 million and 3.0 percent, respectively.

BLS

There is a great deal of chatter about the Great Resignation and we continue with our thesis that the Great Resignation is really more about the Great Retirement as boomers and others with sufficient capital to retire are taking the option to retire instead of switching jobs. To test our theory, we dove into BLS demographics reporting and compared them to some of the charts and graphs released yesterday. Let’s take a look.

We selected two categories from the JOLTS report: mining and construction. We then compared that to the BLS 2020 demographic tables.

Construction and extraction occupations in the BLS demographic tables showed there were only 341,000 workers in that occupation from the 65 and over cohort. The next younger cohort, 55 to 64, had 1,191,000 million workers. There was a huge/steep drop off between one cohort and the next. Note that in the Job Openings chart above has a much higher spike (blue line) than construction jobs. While both jobs are “tough” and hard on the body, it makes sense that mining had a much higher spike because that work is much harder on the body than construction.

What about cushy office jobs?

Once again, if we look closely at the line graph we see that computer and mathematical occupations have a higher spike for open jobs than general professional occupations. If we look at the number of people in the 65 age cohort for computer and math we see there were only 157,000 workers in that field and seven times that in a cohort group that is 10 years younger. This particular occupation seems to have a high “evaporation” rate the older you get. In contrast, other professional occupations only have a drop off rate of about 2.5x from 5.8 million down to 2.2 million.

Let’s take a look at healthcare.

Healthcare has an “evaporation” rate that also accelerates once a cohort crosses the 55 to 64 age cohort group. What inferences can we draw from this information?

The group from our selection with the highest spike in job openings are those with the highest income levels: Professionals and Information technology jobs. This group can easily afford to retire as they tend to be the better education and higher paid workforce.

The second highest group is healthcare. There are many reasons for healthcare to spike. Burn out (from covid), higher paid workers, fear of covid, etc.

The last group is the lower education group construction and mining. And while this group may not have as comfortable retirement package as the other two groups, it did have spikes and we believe it is the boomers and those close to retirement that is driving the “great retirement” as it has been before Covid.

We will keep an eye on this year over year but we already know that 10,000 boomers reach retirement age every day. We also know that by 2030, ALL boomers will be over the age of 65+ and able to take social security and medicare. We also know that there are 70 million boomers although that number may drop off from deaths if Covid is not brought under control over the next decade.

We encourage you to do your own due diligence. You can click on the charts and select groups and theorize as to what factors are causing the “great retirement” and let us know your thoughts.