Private-sector hiring hits lowest rate since 2010 in worrying sign of slowdown

Hiring for the private sector fell in February to the lowest rate since February 2010, when the economy was struggling to pull itself from the depths of the Great Recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday.

Only 4.5 million workers were hired in the private sector last month, down 503,000 from January, according to an update to the BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The survey reports gross hiring and firing, rather than the more widely cited net figures in the monthly jobs reports. As a share of total employment, hires fell to 3.3%, the lowest such rate in 16 years.

Overall, including the public sector, the total number of hires in February tumbled by nearly 500,000 to 4.8 million, causing the hire rate to fall to 3.1%. That is the lowest rate since the entire economy was shut down at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020.

MANUFACTURING HAS STRUGGLED SINCE ‘LIBERATION