More employees jump ship as economy picks up

June 10, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

One sign of better economic times is when more people start finding jobs. Another is when they feel confident enough to quit them.

More people quit their jobs in the past three months than were laid off — a sharp reversal after 15-straight months in which layoffs exceeded voluntary departures. The trend suggests the job market is finally thawing.

Some of the quitters are leaving for new jobs. Others have no firm offers. But their newfound confidence about landing work is itself evidence of more hiring and a strengthening economy.

“There is a century’s worth of evidence that bears out this view that quits rise and layoffs fall as the job market improves,” said Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago.

Still, the number of people quitting their jobs is nowhere near what it was before the recession. Economists expect the improvement in the job market to be fitful, rather than consistent.

Yet the long-term trend points to an improving job market. The economy has created a net 982,000 jobs this year after a recession that wiped out more than 8 million of them.

The government said Tuesday that the number of people quitting rose in April to nearly 2 million. That was the most in more than a year and an increase of nearly 12 percent since January. That compares with 1.75 million people who were laid off in April, the fewest since January 2007, before the recession began.

During the depths of the recession, workers were hesitant to quit — and not only because jobs were scarce. Even if they found a new job, some feared that accepting it would leave them vulnerable to a layoff.

Many clung to their jobs out of fear, said David Adams, vice president of training at Adecco, a national staffing agency. When Adecco tried to recruit workers to fill open positions, it frequently ran into the same obstacle: Few workers felt like betting on a new job that might soon disappear.

Not so much anymore. Adecco is seeing more employed workers seeking interviews, rather than laid-off workers searching for a lifeline.