Well, we added some jobs last month for a change. Payroll employment increased by 162,000. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a lot of those jobs were for the Census and for temporary work. The unemployment rate is unchanged, and information technology and financial sector jobs continue to disappear.
We’re basically treading water, and that’s not good enough to improve the mood of the country. Still, it’s refreshing to get a positive jobs number. We need to keep piling those up, month after month. How’s the economy where you’re living?
We actually added construction jobs, which is nice.
Census jobs weren’t as significant a chunk as I would’ve expected. I think it was 48k. I figured it’d be 100k. So deducting Census, we roughly added enough to keep pace with labor market growth.
Should be quite a bit more from Census in the next two months. They’re supposed to add — what, a million or so by June?
Granted, they’re temp jobs, but the added demand certainly isn’t going to hurt.
Given that employment is a lagging indicator and the US economy is expected to grow by 4% this year, I would say that this is a very good sign that the recovery is well under way.
Things never really got bad here in Virginia other than the fact that Bob McDonnell won the governorship and his AG is a massive homophobic tool bag who knows nothing about the law unless it’s political acting.
Our housing market didn’t bust according to most indicators, even though my own anecdotal evidence tells me otherwise. I mean, houses were like $550-750k in this one neighborhood and now they’re like $250-300. My parent’s house coulda sold for $230 and now it’s prolly back down to $150.
The unemployment here wasn’t bad compared with most of the country, but that’s largely due to us being so close to Washington DC. It’s like home field advantage.
I’m graduating next May, although it will have taken me 5 years. A lot of people in my major who are graduating this year have said it’s not a good year for them, and a lot don’t have jobs yet (Aerospace engineering). So that kind of worries me, but I still have one more year to worry.
So a year ago when Krugman said the stimulus package was about half the size needed he was right.
If I were Obama I’d propose a big job stimulus plan let the Repubs kill it. Then this fall the Dems can say this Repub voted against 75,000 jobs in this district, 400,000 jobs in that state.
The jobless rate is high in Ohio. My son graduated from college last year with a degree in journalism and four years of summer internship at our local newspaper behind him.
Fortunately he has very good computer skills. He hooked up with a group of young entrepreneurs who run a media business that specializes in website construction and maintenance. Then he got a part time job building a website for his former high school. Then he got an internship at a well-respected company nearby, doing technical writing and promotional work. Three part time jobs.
But he was hired two weeks ago by the big company full time with benefits and he’s keeping one of the other jobs as freelance work part time. He’s thrilled to be working. And he’s actually going to earn a good salary. So that’s all good.
on the order of 50,000, I think.
So ~100,000 private sector jobs, not bad.
I would love to know which companies in America are refusing to hire to prove President Obama is a failure?