The U.S. has been creating more than 400,000 jobs every month for a year now, but we should expect that pace to start slowing, probably beginning this quarter. And while normally a slowdown in job creation would be seen as an ominous sign for the economy, with the Federal Reserve so focused on fighting high inflation it’s arguably good news for workers and policy makers alike.

Sustaining this economic expansion requires an environment that’s beneficial to workers while still being acceptable to the Fed, and a tap on the brakes would help us achieve that.

The main reason to believe the current overheated labor market is unsustainable is that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said so. In the press conference following the March meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, he described the labor market as "tight to an unhealthy level." The Fed view is that when there's too much of an imbalance between labor demand and supply, you get a dysfunctional market with too much turnover and pay increases that lead to a unacceptable level of inflation. So if the labor market isn't going to slow down on its own, the Fed will raise interest rates until it does — hopefully achieving a soft landing instead of tipping the economy into recession.

That means we should welcome signs of slowing labor demand. The most recent monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that while openings remain near record highs, they fell modestly in both January and February. Employment website Indeed.com tracks job postings on a weekly basis, and they, too, have found activity declining somewhat over the past few months while still remaining strong.

There is also reason to believe that two of the more cyclical segments of the U.S. economy are slowing right now: The trucking industry appears to be oversupplied in the short term; and higher mortgage rates mean fewer refinancings and probably fewer transactions overall, even though home prices are likely to stay elevated.

And while Covid-19 may be with us forever, its impact on the economy and the labor market are going to be harder and harder to discern. At least some of the heady job growth reported in the first quarter was from people returning to work after recovering from the Omicron variant.  And there is no longer a host of companies waiting to call workers back to offices, which fired up demand for support jobs at restaurants, car hires and dry cleaners. So whatever back-to-the-office employment bump has been contributing to job growth probably won't be around much longer.

Slowing job growth should lead to lower inflation over time because worker income won't be growing as much as it has been since the recovery began. Consider a measure called aggregate weekly payrolls, which takes into account jobs, hours worked and wages. Before the pandemic it was growing at a pace of between 4% and 5% per year, with job growth of around 1.5% and wage growth of around 3%. But over the past year it has expanded at a rate closer to 10% as millions of people have returned to work and wage growth has been robust.

It's unclear what level of aggregate weekly payrolls growth would be consistent with the Fed’s inflation target of 2%, but falling back to a rate of between 6% and 7% would get us a lot closer. That could be achieved by slowing job growth to 2% — 250,000 per month — with wage growth in the range of 4% to 5%. With an unemployment rate at 3.6% and still shrinking, we’d still have a strong environment for workers while putting the Fed more at ease about the economy overheating.

Given the Fed’s commitment to bringing down inflation, it’s going to need to see the labor market slow one way or another, even if a big contribution to rising prices has been supply chain constraints that eventually work themselves out. Fortunately, we seem to be on track for some natural slowing over the next several months, which means the Fed could have less work to do on its end. Hopefully, the end result will work out better for everyone.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the founder of Peachtree Creek Investments. He's been a contributor to the Atlantic and Business Insider and resides in Atlanta.