© 2025. The Trustees of Indiana University
Copyright Complaints
1229 East Seventh Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
News, Arts and Culture from WFIU Public Radio and WTIU Public Television
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Federal funding for public media has been eliminated — we need your help to continue serving south central Indiana
Some web content from Indiana Public Media is unavailable during our transition to a new web publishing platform. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Labor market strong as state preps for mild recession

State officials and  experts agree there's likely going to be a recession in 2023. But new preliminary state labor market estimates are sending some mixed messages.

More than 500 people are already scheduled to lose jobs to layoffs and site closures in the first half of next year, according to  Indiana’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act page. The majority of those job losses are in manufacturing.

Experts say the predicted recession – even if it is just a mild downturn – will likely hit that industry hardest. And Indiana has a lot of manufacturing jobs to lose.

READ MORE: Indiana’s labor market still 'astonishingly healthy' despite warning signs in new employment data

Economists and  state lawmakers anticipate this recession because of  inflation and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight it by raising interest rates on loans. The expectation is companies will borrow less money and, as a result, reduce production.

That’ll put less demand on the global supply chain and bring down  sky-high prices for basic goods.

It will likely also bring layoffs. The  Federal Reserve argues inflation  hurts more people, more significantly.

That can be a pretty scary outlook, but new preliminary labor market estimates tell a more complicated story.

Alongside increasing layoffs, preliminary Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates also show November's unemployment rate remained historically low  at 3 percent, still beating the national rate.

The number of Hoosiers quitting jobs and the number of jobs available was still extraordinarily high in October, according to estimates from the BLS' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data. There were about five job seekers for every 10 openings in Indiana.

Unemployment data and a few other labor market measures are usually released one month after by BLS. While JOLTS estimates, which also contain layoffs, is usually released two months after. All the numbers are preliminary estimates which can be revised the month after.

All this suggests workers still have a lot of power in the state’s job market. The economic choppy waters ahead might change that.

Contact reporter Adam at  arayes@wvpe.org or follow him on Twitter at  @arayesIPB.

Adam was born and raised in southeast Michigan, where he got his first job as a sandwich artist at Subway in high school. After graduating from Western Michigan University in 2019, he joined Michigan Radio's Stateside show as a production assistant. He then became the rural and small communities reporter at KUNC in Northern Colorado. In Indiana, he aims to give workers a platform to make themselves heard and recognized as the backbone of the systems that keep Indiana running. He hopes to help IPB create fuller, more equitable coverage by highlighting those voices in important statewide conversations.