Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics announce the latest U.S., State, and local unemployment rates and analysis.
U.S. State Local
(11/14/09) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: West Bend – This is Richard Krueger, a face amid a recession.
He has been out of work for nearly a year, laid off from his job in the purchasing department at Super Steel Products in Milwaukee.
Almost every workday now, Krueger can be found at a local job center where he doggedly polishes his interview skills and diligently searches the Internet for job leads throughout the Midwest.
He's far from the only person using the facility that sits at the edge of Moraine Park Technical College grounds. Among Wisconsin's cities, West Bend has the state's third highest unemployment rate, a stunning 12.2% in September, down from 13.4% in August.
But this tale of local woe goes mostly unnoticed.
It's not that a single large local employer has reduced work. Instead, those like Krueger who once commuted outside Washington County to jobs throughout southeastern Wisconsin - and others who lost jobs within the county - have become almost unseen victims of wrenching economic pain. Here is the complete article.
(11/10/09) Wisconsin State Journal: With jobless claims remaining high in the state, Wisconsin’s unemployment fund faces a projected deficit of nearly $2.8 billion by the end of 2011 -- more than twice the amount forecast earlier this year.
The projection delivered to lawmakers Tuesday means more state borrowing from the federal government to keep making payments to workers and possible higher taxes for employers and lower benefits for the unemployed to help the state pay the debt off.
One change being pushed by the state’s business lobby to help bridge the shortfall would be to force laid-off workers to forgo their first week of unemployment claims. That promises a big fight on the advisory council that helps set the state’s unemployment insurance policies.
“My position is actually no way. When somebody’s out of work they’re hurting more than any other time,” responded Dennis Penkalski, a labor representative on the advisory council. “It’s almost like a sacred cow.”
The latest figures on the state’s unemployment reserve fund were revealed in a briefing Tuesday to the Assembly Committee on Labor by Hal Bergan, administrator of the state labor department’s Division of Unemployment Insurance. The unemployment fund, which makes payments averaging $290 a week to jobless workers, is funded through taxes on employer payrolls.
With Wisconsin’s unemployment rate at 8.3 percent, the state has already had to borrow $734 million from the federal government to be able to meet federal requirements to pay jobless claims, joining some two dozen other states that have also been forced to borrow, Bergan said. Here is the complete article.
(11/10/09) NY Times: American workers are overpaid, relative to equally productive employees elsewhere doing the same work. If the global economy is to get into balance, that gap must close.
Of course, workers in the United States should earn more than their peers in China, Moldova or Vietnam. Americans take advantage of the higher productivity that makes their country rich: better education and infrastructure, abundant capital and a strong work ethic. But how much higher should American wages be?
The answer depends in large part on two measures: the difference in productivity in making goods that can be traded across borders, and the quantity of such goods. Both measures point to a narrowing wage gap.
Many factors are raising productivity in poor countries. Fast development, cheap capital and more efficient shipping all help. Cheap communication via the Internet reduces costs and makes it easy to trade many more goods and especially services.
The global wage gap has been narrowing, but recent labor market statistics in the United States suggest the adjustment has not gone far enough. Here is the complete article.
(11/08/09) AP Economics Writer: WASHINGTON – It hurts more to be unemployed now than the last time the jobless rate hit 10 percent.
Americans have more than triple the debt they had in 1982, and less than half the savings. They spend 10 weeks longer off the job. And a bigger share of them have no health insurance, leaving them one medical emergency away from financial ruin.
For these reasons, the unemployed are more vulnerable today to foreclosure and bankruptcy than they were a generation ago.
Donald Schenk knows. He's been without work both times. It's worse now, he says.
Back in the early 1980s, when Schenk lost his job at a phone company, he was able to find several temporary jobs — including one testing pinball machines — to make ends meet until he landed full-time work nearly two years later. Here is the complete article.
(11/07/09) CNNMoney.com: NEW YORK -- Despite millions of unemployed job seekers desperate for work, many open positions are languishing unfilled. The reason? Not enough candidates.
With job openings largely concentrated in specialized industries like health care, green technology and energy, some employers say the problem is finding qualified workers, which are in short supply. Meanwhile, they are inundated with eager candidates from other industries who lack the skills and experience that the job requires.
According to a recent survey by Human Capital Institute and TheLadders, more than half of employers said "quality of candidates" or "availability of candidates" are their greatest challenges -- despite the recession.
Mary Willoughby, the director of human resources at the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, New York, has been trying to hire registered nurses, home health aides and service coordinators for several of the agencies that she oversees.
Many of the positions, which require specific skills and offer salaries in the range of $30,000 to $45,000, have been vacant for six months or longer.
The job postings, which appear on CareerBuilder, Craigslist and some regional sites, garner a lot of attention, she says. "We get tons of résumés from people. We are just not getting highly qualified candidates."
The problem, according to Willoughby, is that they are bombarded by résumés from job seekers without the two years or more of health care experience necessary. "We're seeing a lot of people trying to break into the health care arena," she said. Here is the complete article.
(11/06/09) CNNMoney.com: NEW YORK -- President Obama said he signed into law Friday a bill to provide up to 20 additional weeks of jobless benefits to unemployed Americans and extend the $8,000 tax credit for new homebuyers into the middle of next year.
The signing came after the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate spiked to a 26-year high of 10.2% in October, with 190,000 jobs lost in the month.
After calling the jobless rate "sobering," Obama said the bill he signed will "help grow our economy, help create and save jobs, and help provide necessary relief to small businesses," in a statement following the signing.
The House approved the measures by a 403-12 vote Thursday afternoon, a day after the Senate passed the legislation. Here is the complete article.
(11/05/09) Wall Street Journal: A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap.
He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.
"It was a subconscious act," says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. "Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive."
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?
Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor.
"The unspoken attitude is, 'I don't need you. I have the Internet,'" says P.M. Forni, the 58-year-old director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which studies politeness and manners. "The Net provides an opportunity to play hide-and-seek, to say and not say, to be truthful and to pretend. There is a lot of communication going on that is futile and trivial."
That's far too harsh an assessment, says Ben Bajarin, 32, a technology analyst at Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in Campbell, Calif. He argues that because young people are so adept at multimedia socializing, their social skills are actually strengthened. They're good at "managing conversations" and getting to the pithy essence of an issue, he says, which will help them in the workplace.
Total employment in Wisconsin was up by 5,600 jobs in September from August, but down by 124,400 compared with September 2008. Here is the complete article.
(11/02/09) Chicage Tribune: Job hunters get the advice hammered home that re-employment is most likely to occur via networking -- through people who know people. But just try applying for a job through real, live people contact. It's all about the Internet, especially for big-company or government jobs.
And that produces a frequent complaint: Job hunters know they're supposed to have human contact, but they can't break through the voice mail and online systems.
The answer, it turns out, might be on the Internet after all: Try LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Many older workers shy away from social media because they have privacy concerns, a fear of computer viruses or don't know how to use the tools.
Job hunters with computer skills can create a personal Web site but, McKinnon said, the page must be professional-looking and well-maintained or it will be counterproductive. Here is the complete article.
(10/20/09) InformationWeek: Federal stimulus billions are fueling demand for up to 50,000 new information technology positions. Most sought after are tech pros with real-world implementation experience, Windows experts, and network admins.
Hospitals and medical practices are scrambling to deploy e-medical record and other clinical information systems to meet federal requirements for the more than $20 billion in stimulus incentives included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And that means many of them are expanding their IT teams to bring in the skills and expertise they need to implement these systems.
In fact, National Coordinator of Health IT Dr. David Blumenthal recently predicted that the move toward digitized medical record systems could create 50,000 new healthcare IT jobs over the next several years. Many of these jobs will require traditional IT skills as well as knowledge and experience working in clinical environments.
"This is the healthcare's one big shot, and they need to get it right," said Fran Turisco, a research principal at IT consulting firm CSC. It's not just the money that's creating the sense of urgency and the demand for talent, Turisco says, but also the need to meet the government's requirements that healthcare providers demonstrate "meaningful use" of these systems.
"There's demand for highly skilled IT talent in hospitals," she says, especially for people who have already deployed or worked with e-medical record and other clinical systems. Here is the complete article.
(10/16/09) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for September was 8.3%, an improvement from August but a big increase when compared with September 2008, the state Department of Workforce Development said Thursday.
The rate in August was 8.8%. The September 2008 rate was 4.7%.
Eric Grosso, state labor economist, said the trend was encouraging. But he added: "We've got a ways to go for a recovery in the economy."
Wisconsin fared better than the nation as a whole, which had a September seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 9.8%. The national rate compares to 9.7% in August and 6.2% in September 2008.
(10/15/09) WI State Journal: A new report says Wisconsin must invest in more training to prepare needed workers for the nearly half a million new and replacement jobs expected by 2016 that will require education beyond high school but short of a four-year university degree.
The state also can gain a competitive edge in the economic recovery if businesses and policy-makers use the national recession as a time to provide skills training for the more than 426,000 jobs, according to the report from the Workforce Alliance and the Skills2Compete-Wisconsin campaign.
The study also found:
The report is funded by the Joyce Foundation, Ford Foundation and Milwaukee Area Workforce Funding Alliance. For more information, see skills2compete.org/Wisconsin.
(07/24/2009) Stateline.org Article: Minimum-wage earners in 31 states and the District of Columbia can soon expect slightly bigger paychecks thanks to the third and final installment of a federal rate hike that raises the wage floor from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 an hour effective Friday (July 24).
The latest federal bump will enlarge roughly 4.5 million workers’ paychecks by about four cents an hour in some states to almost $1 an hour in others, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. that supported the increase.
Although states recently have led the charge to raise the minimum wage, the federal government historically mandates a national wage floor -- an hourly rate that states must meet or exceed. The three-part hike Congress authorized two years ago – from $5.15 an hour to $5.85 in July 2007, to $6.55 last July 24, to $7.25 this year – was the first federal increase in about 11 years.
Despite the scheduled hike, a number of states boosted their own minimum wages in the interim. Illinois lawmakers in 2007 approved three 25-cent pay raises over three years, bringing the state minimum to $8.25 an hour effective July 1, 2010. Maine lawmakers lifted the state’s wage floor in 2008 by 25 cents – raising it to $7.25 an hour months before the federal government did – and approved an additional 25-cent increase for October 2009.
The Connecticut House and Senate last year even went so far as to override Governor M. Jodi Rell’s veto to boost the state’s minimum wage by 35 cents – from $7.65 to $8 an hour. Similar proposals are pending in states like Michigan, where Democrats hope to introduce a whopping $2.60 an hour increase – from $7.40 to $10 – as a ballot initiative next year.
Other states have automated their pay raises. Ten states – Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington – adjust the minimum wage based on inflation data. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, mandates that its minimum wage be at least $1 more than the federal rate. Nevada offers an extra dollar to minimum-wage workers whose employers do not provide health benefits.
After Friday, 13 states will have a wage floor above the new federal minimum. Atop that list is Washington, which currently requires its workers to be paid at least $8.55 an hour. The state is trumped only by Santa Fe, N.M. – one of four cities that regulate their own wages – which sets its threshold at $9.85 an hour.
Yet economists and lawmakers disagree whether this flurry of wage increases will help both workers and their states’ economies. On one hand, policymakers insist periodic wage bumps help low-income families and generate more consumer spending – two crucial tools to combat the effects of the recession.
Fiscal conservatives, however, oppose the hikes. They argue that wage increases force companies to staff fewer workers, which disproportionally affects young or low-skilled employees on the bottom of the hiring chain.
“There’s a jobless factor to raising the minimum wage,” said Kristen Eastlick, a senior economic analyst at the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. that opposed the hike. “It does increase unemployment, and the hardest hit are low-skilled workers and families struggling to make ends meet. And you have businesses forced to adjust and make new decisions as a result of low revenue streams.”
Those arguments have not stopped federal lawmakers from pondering additional increases. A pending House bill would take a nod from states and tie the minimum wage to living costs. Under the proposal, the wage floor would automatically adjust every four years to be 15 percent higher than the federal poverty threshold for a family of two – or about $8.05 an hour in 2009, using this year’s poverty guidelines. The bill, however, was previously introduced under the same name – the Living American Wage Act -- in 2007. It never emerged from a committee.
The following topics have been moved to the Publications section, where they have become part of our permanent feature of popular workforce topics. Most of these items are from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
