Employment Situation November 2009

7 12 2009

On Friday, the BLS released the Employment Situation report.  Everyone jumped on the news that the unemployment rate actually dropped for the first time in months.  While this is a great indicator, the basis for the jump was an increase in temporary help and healthcare jobs.  With Christmas looming,  I fear this is an artificial indicator as this is temporary help for a season that requires more than normal levels of help.  We need a number of industries adding jobs for this report to be positive, until then it is just a little less negative.

We lost 11,000 jobs compared to the 130,000 that Wall Street expected.  Or perhaps we have cut so many jobs the last few months, that we could not find a place to cut anymore.  I am also curious if this isn’t a little manipulated either in timing or impact as the President has been calling for job creation.

What I would really like to see out of Congress and the White House are very specific plans around job creation.  Just like a company saying we want to see 20% growth, yet not laying out the specific marketing, sales, and operational plans to get there it is all just hope.  And hope is not strategy.

Advertisement

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Communication, Environmental Scan, Performance Management, Targets

Employment Situation Oct 2009

6 11 2009

The employment situation continues to demonstrate the frailty of the current economic climate.  In Sept the unemployment rate was 9.8%, Friday it was announced that Oct witnessed this number increase to 10.2%.  “This is the highest rate since April 1983.”  We are also at the second highest point (and growing) in the history of tracking the data – 1948.

(Here is the link to the commissioner’s report to Congress and the original report)

Employment Situation Oct 2009

If we look at a visual of the informtion, a number of things jump out at least to me:

1.  The Good, it looks like (at least to me) the higher the number, or the swifter the increase, the quicker the the unemployment rate drops.  There appears to be a natural slope (green line – A) to the decline in the the unemployment rate after a spike, which then is followed by a less gradual slope that marks a return to a healthy market (red line – B).  In roughly 1975 and again in 1983 we saw two spikes which then followed the green line’s slope – except in the case of 1983, we actually saw that trend bear out over the longer term, yet moved faster during the initial recovery period (reb box).

2. The Bad – if this follows the trend pattern of 1983 we may be looking at another 7-8 year recovery process to return the unemployment rate to around 6% which roughly appears to be natural healthy level.

3. The Ugly – We have yet to see the peak of this trend.  And even if this does turn around in the next month or two, we are so bad a shape across so many other sectors it may take far longer for us to return to a 6% unemployment rate.  If we continue to see credit tighten up at the rate it is going, we will see continued pressure on unemployment.


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Uncategorized