Guarded optimism on job recovery
A trio of economic forecasts released Tuesday represent the strongest indication to date that the process of recovering the 11 million jobs lost since the start of the recession is under way.
Those forecasts come as Illinois reports another bump in its unemployment rate. Joblessness in Illinois hit 11.3 percent in January, a gain of three-tenths of a percentage point from December, according to monthly data released Tuesday by the Department of Employment Security.
The economic forecasts by Manpower Inc., IHS Global Insight and the Economic Policy Institute were offset by a fourth, less encouraging outlook in the March Consumer Reports Employment Index.
In its quarterly Employment Outlook Survey of 18,000 employers, Manpower reported 16 percent said they plan to add payroll during the second quarter of 2010 — an increase of 5 percent over this time last year.
Another 8 percent expect to decrease staff and 73 percent say they have no plans to decrease or hire employees. Manpower foresees a "positive net employment outlook" in all but one of the 13 sectors covered by its survey.
"U.S. hiring is still in neutral, but revving toward first gear," said Jonas Prising, the president of Manpower’s American operations, in a prepared statement. "It’s moving in the right direction, but it will take some time, with no major speed bumps, before it can accelerate."
Nigel Gault, the chief U.S. economic analyst with IHS Global Insight, concurs. In Gault’s estimation, a "modest hiring" trend will restore 850,000 American jobs by the end of 2010.
The loss of 36,000 jobs in a snow-swept February, Gault said, can be viewed as a good sign free 3-in-1 credit report. Minus the storms that raised havoc along the East Coast, he said, unemployment — which went from 10 percent in January to 9.7 percent in February — might have shown even more improvement.
Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute crunched the January numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and determined that the ratio of job openings to job candidates dropped to 5.4-to-1 (from 6-to-1) in the last month of 2009.
"There is a good deal of month-to-month volatility in this ratio, but, nevertheless, January marked the largest one-month improvement in the history of the series," said EPI economist Heidi Shierholz.
The cautious optimism from IHS Global, Manpower and the Economic Policy Institute was tempered by the Consumer Reports Employment Index. At 48.7 percent, the March index remained basically unchanged from February (49 percent). The index measures the number of jobs the economy has added to the number of jobs lost.
In February, for example, 6 percent of the 1,008 households participating in the index reported losing a job compared with the 3.5 percent that said they found new employment.
The average percentage of lost jobs has stabilized in recent months, according to Consumer Reports. But, the nonprofit cautions, the nation’s economy still has a long way to go.
All told, Illinois has lost 407,000 jobs in the 27 months since the recession began. Nationally, unemployment stands at 9.7 percent. The jobless rate in Missouri is 9.5 percent.
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