… is that the labor market remains in terrible shape. Doug Holtz-Eakin has key findings, including the faint silver lining that hours, earnings, and payrolls rose slightly. The Political Math blog offers a helpful look at which sectors gained jobs and which sectors lost them over the last month. David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal notes the extraordinary gap in the employment rate between those with a BA and those with no more than a high school diploma.

And Catherine Hollander of the National Journal offers a very useful look at the BLS’s JOLT data to suggest that the labor market is in even worse shape than we think:

The hires and quits rates, on the other hand, aren’t influenced by fluctuations in labor-force participation. They are measured as a percentage of total employment, painting a clearer picture of the pace of improvement–a picture that really shows the meaning of frustratingly slow.
The hires rate has basically flatlined at 3.2 percent over the past year, and hiring remains 19.6 percent below the 2007 average. The pace of quits, which are actually an indicator of good health, signaling confidence in the economy and often better things ahead for the employee, inched up to 1.6 percent this spring after nearly two years of bouncing between 1.4 percent and 1.5 percent, and the number of voluntary quits remains 28.2 percent below their 2007 average.

This decline in quits has economic repercussions for the broader economy:

Job holders also depend on quitting and finding new work for their professional advancement and wage growth. That, in turn, is tied to the country’s economic growth. Churn helps move workers from less productive posts to more productive ones. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economists Edward Lazear and James Spletzer estimated that the cost of the reduction in churn over the recent recession was $208 billion, or 0.4 percent of GDP for three and a half years.

We’ve already had a lost half-decade, and we’re not out of the woods yet.