While we are waiting for the 8:30 Non Farm Payrolls report (guess how I am betting), I thought we might take a look at yesterday’s Monster.com Employment Index. (I assume you already saw Thursday’s uptick in New Unemployment claims).
What caught my eye was this beautiful chart of Monster’s jobs listings — a solid uptrend. (You can see each of their monthly releases here).
click for larger graph
The question is, does the chart reflect the macro environment or is it merely revealing of a dead tree asset — newspaper job classifieds — going digital?
The CEO of Monster.com discussed this yesterday morning on CNBC.
I found particularly noteworthy were the areas that experienced increased jobs demand: Military, Mining, Forestry and Retail.
What’s significant about these sector improvements is that the biggest gainer was government — as opposed to private sector job creation. Recall the February Jobs report had a similar disproportionate gain from non-private sector (gummint) jobs. I don’t know what to say about mining or forestry, other than it reflecting the ongoing commodity demand.
And then there’s retail, which on average pays fairly low wages and has poor benefits.
The FT had a good article a couple of days ago about a shortage of petroleum engineers.
The growth sector of the economy has shifted from IT to basics and we need to take into account that one sector is losing jobs while another is gaining.
I know how you are betting, and I wish you might not be right, but you will be and are. There is job shifting, part of the adjustment process Alan Greenspan points to repeatedly as our flexibility, but there are too too too few jobs being created.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the biggest growth area is government related. Private sector employment is still below where it was in 2000 with the only increases in employment being seen in the government sector. I guess the administration has been trying to hire there way out of this jobs recession.
Barry, thats GUVMINT, as in GUVMINT CHEESE….