Welcome to the new labor market, where everyone still quits all the time and some people will just never come back to work

• The US labor market includes millions of Americans quitting in near-record numbers month after month.
• People exited the US labor force in October while the number of unemployed increased.

The dust is settling a little bit on the labor market's rollercoaster of the last two years — and the picture emerging is one where workers are always ready to up and quit, or rethink work more broadly.

Since April 2021, workers have been quitting in near-record numbers. At first, the number of workers throwing in the towel seemed like it was a result of pent-up frustration from pandemic-era uncertainty.

But people kept quitting. In fact, they're still quitting in high numbers, with 4.1 million workers leaving their jobs in September.

At the same time, the labor market is still bustling, even as it starts to slowly cool. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the country added 261,000 payrolls in October, above the 200,000 payrolls forecast by economists surveyed by Bloomberg. That's not as high as some of the blockbuster recovery months post-vaccine, but it still shows at least a warm labor market steadying into a new tempo.

"Ultimately, this is telling a story of a consistently slowing labor market which is what we've been seeing and saying for months," Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, told Insider.

At the same time, though, one economic indicator has remained stubbornly stuck, according to Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed Hiring Lab: The US labor force participation rate.

That tracks the share of adults actively looking for work or working. It's intertwined with the unemployment rate, which tracks the share of people in the labor force who are out of work but looking for a job.

The US labor force participation rate plunged during the pandemic to 60.2% in April 2020. The rate rose after that, but only has partially bounced back. Now it's stuck. Some people are just staying on the sidelines, and not heading back to the labor force — adding to the labor shortage and the tight labor market businesses are dealing with.

"It won't increase at the rate where we've been hoping, that things aren't picking up," Bunker said about the labor force participation rate. "It does look like the supply side rebound folks have been hoping for just isn't really picking up, and any signs of a moderation that we're seeing in the labor market really are mostly coming from a pull back in demand."

Low labor force participation, coupled with still growing wages and a high number of quits, shows that workers are maintaining a new status quo in the labor market, whether that's just leaving their roles for better jobs or departing the workforce altogether.

"It is a bit of a mystery," Zhao said, "because the labor market is still fairly hot overall, and you would expect that to continue to pull workers into the labor force even if it's a little bit harder for them to find a job."

Sometimes, the unemployment rate goes up in a good way when labor force participation ticks up — it means more people are looking for work. But in October, labor force participation went down, and the unemployment rate went up. The unemployment rate rose from 3.5% to 3.7%. Labor force participation declined from 62.3% to 62.2% in October.

As Zhao noted, it's a bit of a mystery why so many workers are still on the sidelines. Early retirements might play a part. So could long covid. But it may never make it back to pre-pandemic highs.

"We do compare prime-age labor force participation to the pre-covid level, but the pre-covid level was considered fairly strong," Zhao said. "There's no guarantee that we would get back to where we were before the pandemic."

There are both cyclical and structural factors in play as to what's going on with labor force participation, according to Bunker.

"So on the cyclical side, I think there are potentially some workers who are out of the labor force right now but actually do want a job," Bunker said. "So maybe there are some efforts that can be made on the policymaker side to help them more actively search. I think there's also some potential for employers to do some more active recruitment of folks who they might not have engaged with in the past."

This includes businesses reaching out more to talent pools that tend to be overlooked for positions, such as people with disabilities and people who have been formerly incarcerated.

However, there's always the possibility that the trend could sour, as more people remain on the sidelines and more jobs get axed. Bunker said hopefully the increase in the unemployment rate is "just one month of data, especially because we saw the prime-age employment-population ratio tick down."

"The hope is that it's still a moderation and that this is not the beginning of a trend where things start to pull back more aggressively," Bunker said.