Job Progress

I’m beginning to think we are becoming immune to employment reporting.  A sentence from the beginning and end of a CNNMoney.com article (emphasis mine): The good news: Overall employers announced fewer planned job cuts. … Economists are expecting the report to show there were 120,000 jobs lost in August, an improvement over July’s 131,000 job loss. In a prolonged recession, I guess these pieces of information are uplifting.

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The Employment Rate

I was having an economic discussion with my father this past weekend and we got on to the topic of the unemployment rate.  I remember hearing John Sumser in talk last year state that having a national unemployment number is pointless.  Unemployment is local – it depends upon the region and, even more, the city in which you are employed.  I agree completely with that premise. The current national unemployment number is listed at 9.8%, but there is much discussion about what the real number is.  I have heard that it is closer to 16% if you factor in the people who have stopped looking and/or had their unemployment benefits… Read More

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The Pain Of A Lagging Indicator

Hiring, that is, and it appears that it is going to be an even rougher road over the back half of 2009.  If you are in the recruiting, hiring, assessing business you are aware of this fact.  9.4% unemployment is remarkable.  From abcnews.com: The percentage of people without jobs in this country is now at the highest point in nearly 26 years. Every month since January 2008 we have seen jobs disappear. So far the economy has shed 6 million jobs since the recession started push (sic) employers to start handing out pink slips. I’m still looking for the report that lists the number of jobs “saved” by the stimulus… Read More

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The Extended Unemployment Rate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has put out their numbers for October and the unemployment rate rose to 6.5% and non-farm employment fell by 240,000.  The job losses occurred across all industries other than healthcare, which rose by 26,000 for the month.  Not surprising, the Healthcare industry has grown in employment by almost 350,000 in the past year alone.  Manufacturing took the biggest fall with over 90,000 losses (27,000 of them are the results of strikes in the aerospace sector) with construction employment second, falling by 49,000. But reading a post from Liz Wolgemuth over at US News & World Report provided some interesting facts that I had not seen before.  The extension… Read More

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Parsing The Unemployment Number

The Herman Trend Alert enewsletter (sorry, no link) takes a look at last week’s unemployment numbers.  Some interesting items in there (emphasis mine): This increase in unemployment continues to mask the real situation. Looking at the BLS’ Household Survey, in the month of May, the national unemployment percentages among adult men and women were 4.9 and 4.8. At the same time, the rate for teenagers, ages 16 to 19 jumped from 15.4 in April to 18.7 in May, an increase of 21.4 percent. While part of this increase is due to high school and community college graduations, these new job seekers do not account for this huge increase. Rather, we… Read More

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