More jobless Americans find new employment
By Carlos Torres
Bloomberg News Service
WASHINGTON — Carmen Gonzales, one of the 1.4 million people who lost their jobs last year as the United States fell into recession, is now working in the career of her dreams.
Gonzales, 24, began work in January as the finance manager for the Junior League of San Francisco, a nonprofit organization of women promoting volunteerism. She landed the position through Robert Half International Inc. after KPMG LLC, the third largest U.S. accounting firm, eliminated her job in early September.
"I definitely noticed that things got better around year-end," Gonzales said. "At the beginning of the year, companies have new budgets to spend and it seemed like hiring picked up." After almost four months on the unemployment rolls, Gonzales had three job offers late in December.
Unemployed workers are starting to find jobs again as the economy rebounds from what may turn out to be the mildest recession since World War II. The United States added 66,000 jobs in February, the first increase since July, the Labor Department reported. The jobless rate fell last month to 5.5 percent from 5.6 percent. The average number of weekly claims filed for unemployment benefits is 380,000 so far this year, compared with a 456,000 average during the fourth quarter of 2001.
Openings posted by employers have risen in the last three months at Monster, the Web-based job-search site owned by TMP Worldwide Inc.
"We've had good activity both ways on our site," said Jeff Taylor, chairman and founder of Monster, after visits from job seekers reached a record in January and job openings posted by employers rose in the last three months. The job market "feels very good" now.
Sales positions catapulted to the top of the list on the site, the first time that's happened in three to four months, Taylor said. The company shows 35,000 such openings, up more than 80 percent since Sept. 1, followed by 30,000 jobs in "information technology," he said.
"This is a sign that companies are becoming more bullish about business, so they feel they can put sales people in place," Taylor said.
Statistics on weekly jobless claims suggest unemployment may peak sooner and at a lower level than thought just a month ago, some economists said.
Claims rose to a high of 535,000 at the end of September and have since retreated to 376,000 for the week that ended March 2. That's a sign that fewer workers are being fired and that unemployment may not rise much more, said Douglas Lee, president of Economics From Washington, a private consulting group based in Potomac, Md.
In four of the last five recessions, the unemployment rate peaked an average of two months after the weekly claims level reached its high. The exception was the so-called jobless recovery following the 1990-91 recession, when the unemployment rate kept climbing for more than a year after claims had started to fall again.
The unemployment rate reached a high so far of 5.8 percent in December, three months after the surge in claims that followed September's terrorist attacks. "All the data suggest that we are very close to a peak at something under or near 6 percent" for unemployment, Lee said.
Not everyone is confident a recovery in the job market is under way. The drop in initial unemployment insurance claims is "misleading" because many fired workers have decided to leave the work force and sit the recession out, said Joseph Abate, an economist at Lehman Brothers Inc. in New York.
Workers not pursuing employment aren't eligible to collect benefits and aren't counted among the unemployed. As the economy improves, these discouraged workers will again try to find jobs, and their re-entry into the market will keep the unemployment rate rising during the early stages of recovery, he said.
