SHARE Click image to enlarge

By of the

In the darkest days of the last recession, few among those who had jobs were able, willing or bold enough to quit them.

That is changing, however, according to a statistic called the national "quit rate," which some might call the "Take this job and shove it" index. The figure shows that the percentage of Americans who are jumping ship voluntarily is hovering at its highest levels in the four-year recovery.

Many see the shift as a sign of optimism for an economy that has sputtered its way through an on-again, off-again rebound from the demoralizing downturn of 2008-'09.

"The quit rate is a useful measure of how much confidence workers feel and how many opportunities they have to switch to a more attractive job," said Steven Davis, a professor who specializes in labor economics and worker mobility at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

When times are good and workers are in high demand, employees quit more frequently than when unemployment is high and workers lack confidence, Davis said.

In the private sector, the percentage of working-age Americans who voluntarily left their job stood at 2.0% in April, up from 1.8% one year earlier and 1.4% at its lowest level in 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That works out to an estimated 2.34 million workers who gave notice in April, compared with 1.54 million at the trough of the slump.

The recession obliterated more than 8 million jobs in less than two years. It's well-documented that many companies in that time learned to get more done with fewer hands, with some workers producing what two or three once did.

In a normal economy, such pressure-cooker environments would have compelled many workers to bolt. But the quitting indicator showed that the climate was too uncertain for such brash moves.

While the indicator has since rebounded from its 2009 lows, it still has a long way to go to regain its pre-recession peak.

In much of 2006, the quit rate held steady around 2.5% for the private sector — before the national economy began to cool and subsequently shifted into reverse with the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis.

It's even further below the levels of 2000, when the nation still was basking in the boom of the dot-com euphoria of the late 1990s. The quit rate peaked at 2.9% before the recession of 2001. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked the quit rate only since December 2000, making it one of the newest U.S. economic indicators.

So the rising quit rate suggests improvement, but it by no means suggests that the job market is as healthy as it ought to be.

"There's still considerable weakness in the labor market," Davis said.

The frequency with which workers break the news to their boss offers insights that aren't apparent in conventional monthly jobs statistics, which focus on the unemployment rate and jobs that are gained or lost.

In purely mathematical terms, the nation made up the over 8 million jobs destroyed by the recession — but it has not yet created jobs for the new generation of young graduates who entered the workforce since the downturn. Their numbers, which are not reflected in the statistics, are nearly as great as the total lost, leaving a gaping hole in the world of work.

That's why many Americans complain that the recovery so far has passed them by.

"The improvement in the labor market is not as great as it looks at face value from the decline in the unemployment rate," Davis said. "The quit rate is one of many indicators that point to a partial recovery."

The quit rate is not followed nearly as closely as much other employment data, such as monthly jobs reports. But it has some influential adherents, Davis said, including Janet Yellen, who chairs the Federal Reserve Bank.

The quit rate belongs to a monthly data set that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — known among economists as "JOLTS" data. That data includes other insights into the national economy that aren't found elsewhere.

Those include an estimate of the number of job openings in any given month. According to the federal agency, the number of unemployed people per job opening was 1.8 when the most recent recession began in December 2007. By that reckoning, an applicant had a decent chance to land a new job for every two applications. By the time the economy bottomed out in 2009, however, the ratio had skyrocketed to 6.2 unemployed people per opening.

As job openings have become more plentiful, that ratio, like the quit rate, also has been improving.

JOLTS data are not available at the state level, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks out four national regions: Midwest, Northeast, South and West.

At the national level, the quit rate is broken out by sector. It shows that government jobs turn over less frequently than the private sector. It also shows that manufacturing jobs (1% national quit rate) are far more stable than the leisure and hospitality sector — covering hotel and restaurant employers — where workers quit more than three times as often (3.5%).

JOLTS statistics also include a figure called the "layoffs and discharge rate," which measures "involuntary separations initiated by the employer." That statistic also has improved as the economy has picked up pace, falling to 1.2% of the workforce in April from 2.0% in 2009.

While those shifts in percentage may seem incremental — unlike the national unemployment rate, which has moved from 10% to 6.1% in the same period — they represent the difference between a paycheck and the unemployment line for hundreds of thousands of Americans.