# Labour Market Tightness Assessment

> Labour Market Tightness Assessment is a paid API for AI agents from stat.halowerk.com, paid per call via x402, $0.006/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-15).

Combines unemployment rate, job vacancy rate, and activity rate for one or more countries into a composite labour market tightness score, capturing whether labour shortages or surpluses are the dominant condition.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://stat.halowerk.com/v1/labour-tightness
- Price: $0.006/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-15
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/labour-market-tightness-assessment-c77ae771
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_H9U1bvQvKk3asojPv6Dp2

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability labour-market-tightness-assessment-c77ae771 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Can you get the labour market tightness assessment for Germany and France — combining their unemployment rates, vacancy rates, and activity rates — so I can see whether employers in those countries are struggling to find workers or whether it's the other way around?

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need a nuanced view of labour market conditions that goes beyond the headline unemployment rate — particularly when distinguishing between tight labour markets (where vacancies are high relative to unemployment) and genuinely slack ones. Ideal for cross-country comparisons, investment research, workforce planning, or macroeconomic monitoring where the vacancy-unemployment relationship carries the analytical signal.

## Known failure modes

- Unknown or unsupported country code returns an error or empty result
- Data unavailable for a requested time period for a given country
- Missing vacancy or activity rate data for a country prevents full tightness computation
- Invalid request body format causes a 400-level error
- Service unavailable or payment not processed results in a failure response

## How this service works

Combines the unemployment rate, the job vacancy rate and the activity rate for one or more countries into a tightness assessment. The measure that carries the signal is the relation between vacancies and unemployment, not the unemployment rate on its own: four percent unemployment alongside a high vacancy rate means employers cannot find people, and the same four percent alongside a low vacancy rate means there are no jobs, and those are opposite situations that the headline rate reports…

## Output

Returns a composite labour market tightness assessment for each requested country, incorporating unemployment rate, job vacancy rate, and activity rate into a single measure. The core signal is the vacancy-to-unemployment relationship, which distinguishes between situations where low unemployment reflects genuine labour scarcity versus mere coincidence with low vacancies, providing a richer picture than headline unemployment alone.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "periods": {
   "type": "integer",
   "default": 8,
   "maximum": 24,
   "minimum": 2
  },
  "countries": {
   "type": "array",
   "items": {
    "type": "string",
    "maxLength": 2,
    "minLength": 2
   },
   "maxItems": 12,
   "minItems": 1
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/labour-market-tightness-assessment-c77ae771/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from stat.halowerk.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/stat.halowerk.com/llms.txt)