Last week (January 9, 2015), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released the – Employment Situation – for December 2014. The data showed that “Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 252,000 in December, and the unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point to 5.6 percent”, which suggests the US recovery is on-going. However, the participation rate continued to decline and the employment-population ratio has not showed much sign of recovery. There are two other ways of looking at the labour market, which are typically neglected by the mainstream press analysis, but which provide very useful information about the direction of the labour market. I updated my gross flows database today and also the job openings and quits database. I will consider the latter next week, but today the question is whether workers have a higher probability of gaining a job in the US now than in the recent past.