Why some workers finally have the upper hand in the job market

Yahoo Finance’s Denitsa Tsekova breaks down the latest on the state of the job market.

Video transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome back. Time now for our Your Money segment. Now more and more companies are offering higher wages and sign-on bonuses to workers as the economy reopens. And job postings are rising at a higher pace than hires. Yahoo Finance's Denitsa Tsekova is here now with details on how workers have a little bit more leverage in the job market. Hi, Denitsa.

DENITSA TSEKOVA: Hi, so yeah, what we're seeing is job openings outpacing the growth of hiring. And we're seeing this trend particularly in food accommodation, which saw the largest monthly increase in job openings in March. And what we're seeing in that industry, we've also obviously heard a lot of debate about worker shortages, labor market tightness. And we're seeing that the workers in that industry are not returning as fast as maybe we were expecting. They're becoming a little bit more pickier. And they're expecting, obviously, safer working conditions.

And we spoke to a few people in the service industry. A lot of them returned to work during the summer, and it was a very difficult time, much lower paid, obviously, due to lower capacity, short work hours, and then much higher risk for your health because of the summer public health situation was very different [INAUDIBLE] and very different from now. So people were having a really different time. They were, again, laid off later on in the pandemic. And this is when a lot of those workers started looking into other options. Two of the people we spoke to went back to college. And they're looking to learn new skills, get education, and probably get a better paying job after this.

So we see workers reconsidering their choices. And at the same time, employers still need those workers. So they're offering higher wages, sign-on bonuses. Just today, we saw McDonald's offering higher hourly wages. We saw Amazon offering a $1,000 bonus, sign-on bonus. But the question here is whether those short-term bonuses is what can attract workers. Or are workers just looking for higher long-term wages and better benefits?

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, Yahoo Finance's Denitsa Tsekova, thanks so much for joining us with all of those details.