Mike Rowe on 'Kilmeade Show': State of US job market 'unhealthy for the whole country'

FOX Business Network's Mike Rowe, whose new primetime FBN show debuts Monday night at 8:00 p.m. ET, said it is "unhealthy" for there to be more than 10 million job openings in the United States while unemployment remains around 5%.

"We have over 10 million open positions right now and many millions of people who are not working. And that is unhealthy, not just for the individuals who are not working or for the employers desperate to hire them, but for the whole country," Rowe told "The Brian Kilmeade Show."

The number of job openings in the U.S. hit a record high for a fifth straight month in July as employers continued to have difficulty finding workers. 

The total number of job openings rose by 749,000 to a seasonally adjusted 10.934 million at the end of July, according to the Labor Department’s Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS. The number of job openings in June was revised higher by 112,000 to 10.185 million. 

Economists surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting 10 million available jobs. 

JOB OPENINGS HIT 10.9M, FIFTH STRAIGHT RECORD HIGH

There have been 72.6 million hires and 65.6 million separations over the past 12 months, resulting in a net employment gain of 7 million.

Rowe also highlighted the problem of the United State offshoring manufacturing jobs overseas as opposed to making essential goods domestically. Rowe argued the lack of manufacturing goods produced domestically was realized during the coronavirus pandemic when necessary medical equipment, supplies, and medicine were in short supply.

"If you order takeout every single night, you will slowly forget how to cook. It’ll just happen. There is nothing inherently bad with that, but, if you look at the macroeconomy, like a frog in the boiling water, it doesn’t happen overnight. It took decades."

Rowe said that the country "slowly abdicated the business of making things in virtually every vertical." 

"And then one day we woke up and we realized where our medicine is, where are our masks? … If you talk to anybody who is trying to make something right now, they will tell you in some way shape or form they have been stoked and frustrated because they simply can’t get whatever it is they need off of a container ship, either because the ships aren’t in the dock or because we can’t find truck drivers to deliver it."

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The former host of the Discovery Channel series "Dirty Jobs" said that his new show on Fox Business, "How America Works," will explore the meaning behind several kinds of jobs.

"If you remember ‘Dirty Jobs,' it's kind of like that without an annoying host embedded right in the center of it. It's just a much simpler look at the men and women who do the kinds of jobs that make civilized life work. And you know what? You can't script this sort of thing," Rowe said. 

"But when you look at the headlines, when I listen to your show and I just look around right now, we're seeing how America doesn't work. We're seeing what happens when laws on the books are simply not acknowledged. We're seeing what happens when unintended consequences are allowed to just spool out indefinitely. This is sort of an antidote to that, you know, real people doing work that most people can understand optically because the fruits of that labor impact them directly."

FOX Business' Jonathan Garber contributed to this report.