Friday, June 4, 2010

Since when is 430,000 new jobs NOT great news?

Today's news sounds good: 430,000 new jobs created in May with the unemployment rate dropping. Why is this being seen as bad news? 411,000 of the new jobs are temporary census workers.

For this recovery to really take off there needs to be an increase in private sector jobs. Businesses have been reluctant to hire because, 1. The recovery is weak and they don't want to prematurely hire in case the economy goes back down, and 2. Productivity has been increasing at a stunning pace. Why hire when you can get more out of your existing workforce?

2 comments:

  1. ...even though your existing workforce is suicidal because they can't handle the stress of all the extra stuff that's being dumped on them...

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  2. The increase in prod is likely not sustainable (for the reason Denise eluded to above). It would be interesting to see what OSHA incident rates look like right now.

    Travis

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