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Friday, October 19, 2012

Unemployment



The state added 13,800 jobs since August, an improvement from the 9,600 jobs added between July and August.

The unemployment rate fell from 10.1 percent in September 2012.

“Today’s news is encouraging because it reinforces the trend of continued job growth,” IDES Director Jay Rowell



 said in a statement. “What we don’t know is how federal decisions regarding the fiscal cliff will impact Illinois’ economy.”

He was referring to deep automatic spending cuts and the end of tax cuts from the President Bush-era that are slated to occur in January if a Congressional budget deal isn’t reached.

The biggest job gains since August were in professional and business services, up 7,800; government, up 6,900; and leisure and hospitality, up 3,400.

The main measure of employment in the United States is the Current Population Survey conducted monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 1878, Carroll D. Wright set out to do something that nobody in the United States had apparently ever done before. He tried to count the number of unemployed.

As is the case today, the 1870s were a time of economic anxiety, with a financial crisis — the panic of 1873 — having spread into the broader economy. But Wright, then the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, thought there weren’t nearly as many people out of work as commonly believed. He lamented the “industrial hypochondria” then making the rounds, and to combat it, he created the first survey of unemployment.

The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who “really want employment,” according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they had been earning before.

Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22,000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his “intelligent canvas” had proven the “croakers” wrong. From Massachusetts, he went to Washington, where he served as the inaugural director of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and later as the head of the United States Census. His method for counting — and not counting — the unemployed became the basis for Census tallies of the jobless and, eventually, for the monthly employment report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over the last few decades, there has been an enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man’s land of the labor market that Carroll Wright created 130 years ago. These people are not employed, but they also don’t fit the government’s definition of the unemployed — those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.”


The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to a near four-year low of 7.8 percent in September, a potential boost to President Barack Obama's re-election bid.


The Labor Department said on Friday that the unemployment rate, a key focus in the racefor the White House, dropped by 0.3 percentage point to its lowest point since January 2009.
A survey of households from which the jobless rate is derived showed 873,000 job gains last month, the most since June 1983. The drop in unemployment came even as Americans moved back into the labor force to resume the hunt for work. The workforce had shrunk in the prior two months.
The household survey is volatile. A survey of business establishments showed employers added 114,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, a touch above economists' expectations for 113,000 jobs. Employment for July and August was revised to show 86,000 more jobs created than previous reported.
It was the second-to-last report before the Nov. 6 election that pits Obama against Republican Mitt Romney.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday after Wednesday's first presidential debate showed that Romney gained ground and is now viewed positively by 51 percent of voters. Obama's favorability rating remained unchanged at 56 percent.
Persistently poor labor market conditions led the Federal Reserve in September to announce a plan to buy $40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities each month until it sees a sustained turnaround in employment.
The central bank, which also pledged to keep overnight lending rates near zero until at least mid-2015, hopes the purchases drive down long-term borrowing costs and spur the recovery.
The Fed's ultra-easy stance has started to free up credit, giving a lift to consumers, economists said. That, in turn, helped lift retail hiring in September.

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