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  • Layoffs Down Slightly in November, According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Report

    There were fewer layoffs in November than in October, but the total number of layoffs in 2011 has now surpassed 2010, with one month still to go. James O'Toole reports for CNNMoney : Outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said 42,474 planned layoffs were announced in November, down 0.7% from October's total. That's the second straight drop after September's 28-month high of 115,730. But job cuts announced this year are up 13% overall and now total 564,297 -- already more than 2010's full-year total of 529,973 -- and we still have to get through December. Government and retail jobs, as well as those in the financial sector, have taken the biggest hit so far this year, the report showed. The government has announced cuts of more than 180,000 jobs this year, while retail has lost more than 48,000 and financial services 56,000. Read the full article here . Note: the Challenger report is for layoffs specifically. We'll be looking ahead to the Labor Department's monthly employment report for overall jobs numbers this Friday.

  • Chicago Fed: A (Very) Little More Economic Activity in October

    Economic activity edged up ever so slightly in October. The Chicago Fed 's National Activity Index remains below 0, but it went from -0.20 in September to -0.13 in October. Here's a look at the National Activity Index trend (note: this charts the three-month moving average, as opposed to monthly index levels): Some of the key factors in the index for October: Production-related indicators made a contribution of +0.15 to the index in October, up from –0.05 in September. Industrial production rose 0.7 percent in October after ticking down 0.1 percent in the previous month. Manufacturing production rose 0.5 percent in October after increasing 0.3 percent in September. Additionally, manufacturing capacity utilization increased to 75.4 percent in October from 75.1 percent in the previous month. The employment-related indicators’ contribution to the index in October was +0.03, down from +0.14 in September. Payroll em- ployment edged up 80,000 in October after increasing 158,000 in the previous month. In contrast, the unemployment rate edged down from 9.1 percent in September to 9.0 percent in October. The sales, orders, and inventories category contributed +0.01 to the index in October, up slightly from –0.01 in September. The contribution from the consumption and housing category to the index decreased to –0.32 in October from –0.28 in September. Housing starts edged down to 628,000 annualized units in October from 630,000 in September. Conversely, housing permits increased to 653,000 annualized units from 589,000 over the same period. Read the release here .

  • Chart(s) of the Day: The Effect of Construction Crash on Jobs and GDP

    Adrian Peralta-Alva , Senior Economist at the St. Louis Fed , gives us two charts that highlight the impact of the housing boom and bust on employment and GDP across 31 nations: Peralta-Alva writes: The chart on the left shows the direct effect of the changes in construction sector employment from 2008 to 2010 versus total employment for 31 different countries. The change in construction sector employ- ment is the construction sector’s proportion of 2008 employment times the percentage change in this sector’s employment from 2008 to 2010. This chart also contains a statistically fitted line that illustrates the strong relation between the two variables. The fitted line implies that declines in construction employment can directly account for about half of the observed changes in total employment. The chart on the right shows a similar analysis for the direct effects of construction sector output declines and declines in total GDP. The statistically fitted relation between these two variables is still positive, but a little weaker as the dots do not follow the line as closely. This weaker relation may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that the share of total employment in the construction sector is considerably higher than its share in GDP. Read Construction and the Great Recession here .

  • October Jobs Report: Unemployment now at 9.0 Percent

    The US economy added 80,000 jobs in October, according to the latest numbers released by the Department of Labor . The unemployment rate dipped down slightly, to 9.0 percent. The professional and business services and leisure and hospitality sectors led the job growth, while government employment continued to decline. Perhaps the most positive news from the report is that the number of long-term unemployed, those out of work for 27 weeks or more, dropped by 366,000 over the month. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) decreased by 374,000 to 8.9 million in October. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In October, 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 967,000 discouraged workers in October, a decrease of 252,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.6 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in October had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • Atlanta Fed Macroblog: Charting Estimated Jobs Recovery

    On the heels of the September good-but-not-good-enough jobs report, David Altig --senior vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed --charts how long it will take for the US economy to recover all the jobs lost since the start of the recession: The chart is from the Atlanta Fed's Macroblog , where Altig writes: Payroll employment growth has averaged about 110,000 jobs a month since February 2010, the jobs low point associated with the crisis and recession. This growth level compares, unfavorably, with the 158,000 jobs added per month during the last jobs recovery period from August 2003 (the low point following the 2001 recession) through November 2007 (the month before the recent recession began). One hundred and ten thousand jobs a month compares favorably, however, to the 96,000 job creation pace so far this year. Are these sorts of differences material? If the economy can find its way to creating jobs at the same rate as the last recovery—which nobody remembers as particularly off-the-chart spectacular—we would be back to the prerecession level of overall employment by spring 2015. If, on the other hand, we can only eke out the sub-100k pace we've seen this year, that date moves out to 2017. Altig goes on to point out that this chart is for the number of jobs, and not for the unemployment rate. With the slowest jobs recovery rate of the above chart,the unemployment rate would actually get higher, according to Altig's estimates. Read the full post here .

  • August ISM Non Manufacturing Index

    This chart comes from Calculated Risk , and it shows the ISM Non Manufacturing Index and the ISM Employment Index . The indices are based on surveys of purchasing and supply executives across the country. Anything above 50 is a sign of growth in the sector. So we saw an uptick in the rate of growth in non manufacturing that, according to Calculated Risk, exceeded expectations. Read the Calculated Risk post here . The ISM report notes where the growth is: The 10 non-manufacturing industries reporting growth in August based on the NMI composite index — listed in order — are: Mining; Information; Retail Trade; Wholesale Trade; Transportation & Warehousing; Accommodation & Food Services; Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting; Utilities; Public Administration; and Professional, Scientific & Technical Services. The five industries reporting contraction in August are: Educational Services; Arts, Entertainment & Recreation; Management of Companies & Support Services; Health Care & Social Assistance; and Finance & Insurance. Read the August 2011 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® here .

  • July Jobs Report: Unemployment Rate 9.1%, Small Job Gains in Private Sector Nearly Matched by Losses in Public Sector

    The unemployment rate has edged back down to 9.1%, as the US economy gained 117,000 as the US economy jobs in May, according to the latest report from the Department of Labor . The private sectors continues to add jobs. Notably, health care, retail trade, manufacturing, and mining led the way in hiring, while the public sector continued to lose jobs. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was about unchanged in July at 8.4 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In July, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, little changed from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in July, about the same as a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in July had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • US Employment-to-Population Ratio Dropping

    The employment-to-population-ratio for the US has come to much more closely resemble that of Western Europe, according to New York Fed researchers Christian Grisse , Thomas Klitgaard , and Ayşegül Şahin . Writing at Liberty Street Economics , Grisse, Klitgaard, and Sahin highlight the narrowing of what they call the employment gap: Between 1980 and 2000, the employment-to-population ratio was on average about 10 percentage points higher in the United States than in Europe. Part of this difference was attributable to higher labor taxes, higher minimum wages, and better benefits for unemployed and retired workers in Europe. In particular, higher labor taxes discourage people from working and higher minimum wages contribute to joblessness among unskilled and young workers. In addition, more comprehensive unemployment insurance discourages unemployed workers from accepting less desirable jobs, the lower cost of higher education reduces employment among student-age workers, and more generous pension systems encourage workers to retire earlier. However, as the chart below shows, the gap between the employment-to-population ratio in the United States and Europe (defined here as the fifteen countries in the European Union before the 2004 expansion into Eastern Europe) has declined significantly in recent years, narrowing from 10.5 percentage points of the population in 2000 to 4.8 percentage points in 2007. The gap narrowed further during the global financial crisis and recession and had almost vanished, at 1.7 percentage points, in 2009. Read The Vanishing U.S.-E.U. Employment Gap here .

  • The Curious Case of Older Workers and Employment During the Recession

    Casey Mulligan has a very interesting post at the Economix blog today, based on this surprising graph: So older workers have either been more successful at keeping their jobs. Or many have had to return to work or work longer because of diminishing funds in retirement accounts--in which case they have had more success than younger workers at finding employment. Or both. Read Why Hasn’t Employment of the Elderly Fallen? here .

  • Kaufman Foundation Report: Small Businesses 'Starting Smaller, Staying Smaller'

    No matter what the prevailing discussion is in Washington, job creation remains perhaps the biggest challenge for policymakers. And many of the most ardent small business supporters argue that their sector is the real engine of job creation in the US. So jump-starting that engine would certainly be welcome. But it may be that small businesses started to change in size before the recession. That is, that they became smaller and had fewer employees. A new Kaufman Foundation report highlights this issue, and makes the case that a boost in small business job creation is highly dependent on the number of small businesses, and not so much on current small businesses hiring more people. Recent Census Bureau research has pointed to one factor that is contributing to this slowdown in job creation—shrinking job creation in startups. As shown in Figure 1, startups created an average of 3.5 percent of total U.S. jobs annually in the 1980s, but in the 2000s contributed only 2.6 percent of total U.S. jobs. While diminished in number, these jobs still were the difference between positive and negative overall net job growth in the United States. Media and academic commentators who bemoan America’s unusually slow rate of job creation after the 2007–2009 recession are missing what we believe is a longer-term trend that began earlier in the decade and might best be called a slow jobs “leak.” In the pages that follow, we draw upon newly available data to track businesses over time and dig deeper into the health of U.S. startups. We examine young companies’ size at birth, jobs created, and survival patterns to draw inferences about the health of emerging companies in the United States. The patterns we find among young businesses show that recent U.S. startups are performing much worse than prior cohorts in terms of job creation. Conventional wisdom about job growth tends to focus solely on the jobs that are being created at existing (typically big) companies. But as a wealth of recent research has shown,6 new businesses are vital contributors to a healthy jobs market. Indeed, we know that, until the Great Recession, new firms in the United States generated on average about 3 million new jobs every year. While these firms typically follow a quick up-or-out pattern of success or failure, our analysis highlights for further scrutiny of some additional and, we believe, significant facts about the jobs actually created by new businesses. Read Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation here .

  • McKinsey Global Report on 'Job Creation and America's Future'

    The McKinsey Global Institute 's new report on job creation paints a grim picture of employment prospects in the US for the coming years. The authors write that in today's global economy "there is no more important economic priority than building a strong workforce." And they project a return to full employment will take longer than in previous recoveries. Much longer. Here is a look at their projection compared to past recessions: The US economy needs to find jobs for the millions who lost jobs since the start of the recession, and then it needs to provide sustained growth and "better matching of US workers to jobs" for there to be any hope of a return to full employment by the end of the decade. From the report: To return to prerecession employment levels by 2020 and accommodate the new entrants into the labor force, the United States will need to create 21 million net new jobs in this decade. To understand how this might be achieved, we created three scenarios of sector job growth, using our survey data, interviews with companies, and macroeconomic forecasts of sector demand. In the most optimistic scenario, 22.5 million new jobs could be created by 2020, returning the economy to a 5 percent rate of unemployment by 2018. However, in the low-job-growth scenario, only 9.3 million net new jobs are added—implying continued levels of high unemployment. In our midrange scenario, about 17 million jobs would be created, with the unemployment rate remaining at nearly 7 percent in 2020 (Exhibit E2). The low-job-growth scenario is frighteningly familiar. Essentially, it would be a continuation of the weak US job creation trend since 2000. It would mean further contraction in manufacturing employment, a continued wave of automation and offshoring in administrative and back-office positions, and a new wave of automation in retail (for instance, more widespread adoption of self-checkout). As in the past decade, our projections show that college graduates would fill a disproportionate share of whatever jobs would be created. Where the scenario would diverge from the past decade is in health care, in which large efficiency gains or significant cost controls unaccompanied by job-creating innovation could slow rates of job growth. Read the full report, An economy that works: Job creation and America’s future , here .

  • Indeed: Interactive Map of Job Listings Per Capita by Metro Area

    The job search site Indeed has an interactive map that roughly shows which metro areas have the most new job listings. This is based on data from the first quarter of 2011. Here's what the map looks like: Click here to use the interactive map. (H/t The Big Picture )

  • February Jobs Report: 192,000 Jobs Added

    The US economy added 192,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate dropped to 8.9% according to the latest report from the Department of Labor . Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : The economy has created, on average, 106,000 jobs per month since February 2010. Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involun- tary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged at 8.3 million in February. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In February, 2.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, up from 2.5 million a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 1.0 million discouraged workers in February, a decrease of 184,000 from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in February had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • New Competition for Innovative Economic Policy Ideas

    Stop reading and analyzing other people's opinions about how to fix the economy, and start sharing your own. It could net you some money. The Hamilton Project --a Brookings Institution initiative--is going to award $25,000 in prize money for the top proposals to fix what ails the U.S. economy: The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative at the Brookings Institution, has launched a prize competition to identify new and innovative thinking about policies to create jobs in the United States and enhance productivity. In the spirit of the America COMPETES Act that was recently reauthorized by Congress, the Project believes that prizes are a valuable tool for spurring innovation and finding solutions for some of our nation’s most pressing challenges. The competition is open to academic, business and policy professionals who can demonstrate an original policy solution for increasing employment and productivity within two years of its implementation. The winning proposals will be evidence-based and also take into account the economic reality of federal and state budget constraints. They should also identify likely political constraints. The Hamilton Project will award $25,000 in prizes, with the winner of the 2011 competition receiving $15,000 and the runners-up sharing the remaining $10,000. In addition to the cash prizes, the winning proposal will be featured on The Hamilton Project website and the author may be invited to turn that proposal into a formal discussion paper issued by the Project. Come to think of it, if you can fix the economy, your idea is worth a fair bit more than $15,000. But maybe the exposure is worth it. Or maybe you'll be appointed Economy Czar and you can order Timothy Geithner and Austan Goolsbee around. More information here .

  • Manufacturing Sector Adds Jobs for the First Time in a Decade

    +1.2%. Not a startling figure. But as James Hagerty reports in the Wall Street Journal , that may be a pretty significant number, as it represents the growth rate of manufacturing jobs in the US for 2010. It is the first year in which the sector gained more jobs than it lost since 1997. Of course, there was a lot of room to grow after the losses during the recession, so while the positive growth is significant, it may not be time for widespread celebration. And while growth may continue, Hagerty reports, it won't be at fast rates: The economists' projections for this year-calling for a gain of about 2.5%, or 330,000 manufacturing jobs-won't come close to making up for the nearly six million lost since 1997. But manufacturing should be at least a modest contributor to total U.S. employment in the next couple of years, these economists say. After a steep slump during the recession, manufacturing is "the shining star of this recovery," says Thomas Runiewicz, an economist at IHS. He expects total U.S. manufacturing jobs this year to rise to about 12 million. Currently, manufacturing jobs account for about 9% of all U.S. nonfarm jobs; the average pay for those jobs is roughly $22 an hour, or nearly twice the average for service jobs, according to government data. Despite the upbeat forecasts, job growth may remain modest because many companies are finding ways to increase production through greater efficiency and automation, without adding many workers. In the third quarter, U.S. manufacturing productivity increased as output rose 7.1% from a year earlier and hours worked grew just 3%. Conrad Winkler, a vice president at the consulting firm Booz & Co. who focuses on manufacturing, says manufacturers are being very cautious in their hiring, partly to avoid the risk of having to lay off people later on. Read the full article here . And watch James Hagerty discuss manufacturing jobs on WSJ's News Hub:
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