Saturday, April 3, 2010

“March jobs surge lessens pressure on struggling ... - TheDay” plus 3 more

“March jobs surge lessens pressure on struggling ... - TheDay” plus 3 more

March jobs surge lessens pressure on struggling ... - TheDay

Posted: 03 Apr 2010 09:09 AM PDT

Washington - Like a breath of spring air, exhilarating and hinting at still better days ahead, the U.S. economy got its best jobs report in three years Friday as employers added 162,000 jobs in March - a substantial boost itself and a harbinger of more large-scale gains ahead.

Encouraging as the Labor Department report was, it wasn't strong enough to bring down the unemployment rate. The jobless figure remained stuck at 9.7 percent for the third month in a row amid a surge of people returning to the labor market as the overall economy recovers from the worst economic crisis in more than half a century.

And economists, mindful of continuing problems and uncertainty, were generally cautious in assessing the employment gain.

"Having lost 8.2 million jobs over a period of two years, it's a drop in the bucket," said Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business-membership and research organization in New York. "It's too early to say we have a sustainable recovery."

Part of the concern stems from the fact that it's hard to pinpoint specific areas of the economy with the potential to send employment rocketing upward. The housing industry, long a staple of economic growth, remains deeply troubled, as does construction.

And, while manufacturing and exports have helped pull the economy out of its nosedive, they face long-term problems of global competition and currency barriers.

Analysts reckon that the economy needs to create 125,000 or so new net jobs a month just to keep pace with the population growth, but depending on how fast people pour into the labor market, many more jobs than that will be needed to cut into the unemployment rate.

Still, van Ark said, March was "the first month of really solid growth" in a long time. "We can be a little bit more optimistic."

A chunk of the job increases in March, or 48,000 positions, came from the hiring of temporary workers by the Census Bureau. But the private sector generated 123,000 jobs last month, more than many analysts were projecting.

Orders picking up

Manufacturing payrolls expanded for the third month in a row, adding 17,000 jobs, led by fabricated metal and machinery makers. Some factory owners say they are hoping to hire this spring, but they remain guarded about adding payrolls too quickly after the painful recession.

"I'm looking at the second quarter to see how business pans out," said Sanda Westlund-Deenihan, president of Quality Float Works Inc., a Chicago-area maker of industrial floats and valves.

She said that domestic sales as well as export orders have been picking up since last fall, but rather than hire anybody, she said she had been filling the gap by giving overtime and Saturday work to her existing 17 employees and by going to the shop floor herself to help out.

"We can't get the work out the door without people," she said.

Another indicator of future hiring, the temporary-help sector added 40,000 workers last month, boosting its increase since September to 313,000.

Financial services and the information industry lost jobs in March, but health-care, education, retail and the leisure industry employers all added to their payrolls. Even the hard-hit construction sector ended its long string of severe job losses last month, adding 15,000 jobs.

The Labor Department on Friday also revised upward the nation's payrolls for the first two months of the year. The economy created 14,000 jobs in January, instead of losing 26,000 as previously reported, officials said. And the losses in February were shaved by more than half to 14,000.

Taking the first three months together, the economy added an average of 54,000 jobs monthly - a dramatic turnaround from losses averaging 752,700 jobs a month in the first quarter of 2009 and 89,700 in the final quarter of last year. These figures don't include self-employed workers, whose numbers also appear to be rising but are not precisely tracked by the government month to month.

'Pride and satisfaction'

President Barack Obama hailed the March report as a significant milestone.

"We are beginning to turn the corner," the president said, speaking Friday afternoon at Celgard, a Charlotte, N.C., company that produces lithium battery devices. "This month more Americans woke up, got dressed and headed to work in an office or factory or storefront.

"More folks are feeling the sense of pride and satisfaction that comes with a hard-earned and well-deserved paycheck at the end of a long week of work."

Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore, viewed the March performance as a signal of accelerating growth in the months ahead. It "sets in motion a self-reinforcing dynamic that lends solidity to the expansion," he said in a note to clients.

Certainly, over the next couple of months, the economy will get a big lift from the Census Bureau's hiring of hundreds of thousands of temporary workers to knock on doors and collect data for the constitutionally mandated decennial count of the nation's population. But most of those jobs will be part-time, paying $10 to $20 an hour, and will likely last just a few weeks, according to government reports and private economists.

What remains to be seen is whether private employers can pick up the pace of hiring fast enough to drive down the unemployment rate and begin to fill in the crater-sized jobs hole left by the recession. Thirteen states, plus the District of Columbia, reported double-digit unemployment rates in February - including California, Illinois and Florida.

New work force additions

A broader Labor Department measure of unemployment and under-employment, which includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs, rose a notch to 16.9 percent in March.

This last month, without the statistical rounding that government statisticians employ, the jobless rate actually went up to 9.74 percent from 9.68 percent in February. That's because even though the economy added a substantial number of jobs, the labor force - comprising people working and those looking for jobs - increased by nearly 400,000 in March.

As hiring prospects look better, more workers sidelined during the recession will re-enter the labor force. And this summer they will be joined by a flood of fresh graduates, all of which could push up the unemployment rate in the coming months.

"While (Friday's report) is very good news, it's not a signal that the private sector is poised to create the kinds of numbers of jobs to put many people back to work," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

The ranks of the unemployed grew last month by 134,000 to cross 15 million. And a record 44 percent of these workers, or more than 6.5 million, have been jobless for six months or longer - an increasingly worrisome social and economic situation as many of them are losing their skills and struggling to compete for jobs.

"For those laid off, unemployment is stretching longer and longer and putting severe distress on families," said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a group advocating congressional funding to extend jobless benefits through 2010. Without action, the group said, about one million unemployed workers stand to lose those benefits in April.

Many analysts see a slow jobs recovery ahead and unemployment remaining high for the next few years. Although the broader economy has been expanding since last summer, growth this year is expected to come in at only about half the robust 5.6 percent rate of the fourth quarter of 2009.

In past recoveries after a deep downturn, economic growth has often been much stronger for a longer period and hence has led to more vigorous hiring.

But with millions unemployed and many others facing stagnant incomes or having overextended themselves in the boom years before the recession, consumers aren't likely to provide as much spark to the economic or job recovery as they typically do after recessions by buying houses and big-ticket items that had been postponed.

"There is little enthusiasm among owners to hire more workers, primarily due to continued weak sales trends," said William Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying group.

Business spending for software and equipment, which had been growing at good clip, has more recently shown signs of fading, said van Ark of the Conference Board.

The housing industry, traditionally a strong job generator following a recession, also remains depressed and can't be expected to lead a recovery.

All of which raises the question: "Where are the jobs going to come from?" said van Ark. "Caution is required."

Peter Nicholas in the Tribune Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

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Business briefs - Dubuque Telegraph Herald

Posted: 03 Apr 2010 07:57 AM PDT

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Collections rise for state education tax - Tuscaloosa News

Posted: 03 Apr 2010 01:23 AM PDT

The Associated Press

MONTGOMERY | A state official says Alabama's tax collections for education rose 1.9 percent in March from a year earlier.


Acting state Finance Director Bill Newton said Thursday it's a sign that the state economy has stopped shrinking.

The finance department says the trust fund collected $442 million in March, an increase of $8 million, or 1.9 percent from March 2009.

The finance department also reported that revenues for the General Fund totaled $634.3 million in October through March, a drop of 20.5 percent from the same period a year earlier.

Last year, lawmakers transferred money to the General Fund that had been reserved to pay potential refunds to companies disputing past payments of business privilege taxes.


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Launches Cobra Mobile's New iPad Title Pukk HD Business ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted: 03 Apr 2010 08:04 AM PDT

(AP) — SANTA MONICA, Calif.-- (BUSINESS WIRE)-Apr. 03, 2010--FreeAppADay.com, the Leading iPhone Application Discovery Portal, in collaboration with Cobra Mobile, developer of high rated iPhone titles including Low Grav Racer and iBomber, are proud to announce the release of Pukk HD, one of the first free 1 and 2 player iPad apps available and that it is also the first to include direct in app advertising for www.FreeAppADay.com.

"Pukk HD is our first all free app," says Mark Ettle, Founder of Cobra Mobile. "Something simple but something incredibly fun. The game has a great single player mode where you have to beat the previous high score but the game really comes to life with the 2 player mode where both players play on-screen at once."

FreeAppADay.com recently announced the launch of its iPad dedicated site www.FreeiPadAppADay.com. The new website will follow in the footstep of FreeAppADay.com by offering highly rated paid iPad application Free for a single day.

"We are very proud to be working with Cobra Mobile," says Joe Bayen, CEO at FreeAppADay.com. "Our business model is centered towards the monetization of highly polished application and Pukk HD is right in line with the type of application expected by our audience."

Additionally, to celebrate Saturday's iPad launch, popular iPhone application Chop Chop Ninja will be on special display on the site with an exceptional price drop from $2.99 to 99 cents for a single day.

About FreeAppADay.com

FreeAppADay.com is a social networking website built to facilitate iPhone application discovery as well as offer a centralized location for iPhone enthusiasts and developers of polished iPhone applications.

--30--CSD/sa

CONTACT: ICS Mobile

Jennifer Collins, 1-310-598-5199

Press@icsmobile.com

KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: ENTERTAINMENT ELECTRONIC GAMES TECHNOLOGY CONSUMER ELECTRONICS ONLINE RETAIL INTERNET SOFTWARE MOBILE/WIRELESS RETAIL

SOURCE: FreeAppADay.com Copyright Business Wire 2010 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100403005020/en

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