Ever since the wave of the COVID-19 epidemic hit the world the job market has been slow to recover, especially in the United States. After all, in a recent report, Spotify made another cut to its staff with the official number being 1,600 which is almost 20% of its workforce.
In a statement, CEO, Daniel EK stated he made the "difficult" choice due to economic growth slowing "dramatically". In addition there has also been a report of various jobs seemingly increasing levels, of stress in their employees.
However, it seems that the recovery process is starting to see some headway as The Hill has reported: "Private employers added 164,000 jobs in December and wages were up by 5.4 percent from last year, according to the National Employment report released Thursday by the ADP research institute". In a press release, ADP's Chief Economist, Nela Richardson, said "We're returning to a labor market that's very much aligned with pre-pandemic hiring. While wages didn't drive the recent bout of inflation, now that pay growth has retreated, any risk of wage-price spiral has all but disappeared".
In another report from Bloomberg, they shared the same numbers and reported that "Workers who stayed in their job saw a 5.4% median pay bump in December from a year ago, according to the report. For those who changed jobs, wages rose 8%. Both figures marked the slowest pace of increase since 2021".
The report from ADP goes into further detail, for example, by displaying the "Median Change In Annual Pay for Job-Stayers by firm size". For example, according to the report small firms with "1-19 employees" saw a hike by 4.6%. Firms with 20-49 employees saw a hike of 5.6%. Firms that were considered "Medium" saw the biggest hike in that category with a stat of 5.7%. However, the biggest increase across the entire board was in the "Leisure/Hospitality" industry with a whopping stat of 6.4%.
While there is seemingly still a lot of work to do before we can see the job market and overall economy improve this report can provide a slight comfort to some as there is not only an increase in actual jobs but also an increase in wages which is always a good thing as we the overall cost of living continues to fluctuate.
