The decline in help-wanted ads in the U.S. stands in contrast with job vacancy numbers published by the country’s Bureau of Labour Statistics.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
It’s no secret that Canada’s job market is struggling as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs weigh on hiring.
But despite Mr. Trump’s repeated claims about the strength of hiring south of the border, job markets in both countries are in the same deepening funk.
The past week has brought one grim headline after another about layoffs in the U.S. Three companies alone – Amazon.com Inc., United Parcel Service Inc. and Target Corp. – said they were cutting nearly 70,000 positions combined.
Despite that, Mr. Trump boasted the U.S. economy is a job-creating powerhouse. “All new jobs created in America under my administration have been created by the private sector,” he said at the APEC summit in South Korea this week. “The private sector created the record number of jobs that we’re talking about.”
Exactly how many jobs the U.S. is creating or losing is a mystery right now, since the government shutdown has created a data void.
But third-party sources like Indeed.com, the job listing service, are helping fill that gap. And the trend is not promising.
The steady decline in U.S. help-wanted ads stands in contrast with job vacancy numbers published by the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, which suggest openings have been relatively stable for the last year. Those official numbers were already drawing scrutiny because of gaps in data gathering – the survey response rate for the closely watched Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey sits at just 35 per cent, down from nearly 70 per cent a decade ago.
It’s worth noting Indeed’s job vacancy count also tells a somewhat sunnier picture for Canada than Statistics Canada’s payroll employment survey, released Thursday. In August, the number of job vacancies stood at 457,440, a 2.4-per-cent decline from July and the lowest level since September, 2017.
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