Some Goods News About the Labor Market….
Friday’s non-farm payrolls report overshadowed some relatively good news in other key metrics. As Goldman Sachs noted last week, many indicators have been pointing to stronger labor markets than the big NFP figure highlighted in the Friday data. And a few new data points from Friday confirm this thinking.
The first is the Monster Employment Index which “ is a broad and comprehensive monthly analysis of U.S. online job demand conducted by Monster Worldwide, Inc.” The index jumped 5% on a year over year basis and 4% on a month over month basis (via Monster):
The other bit of good news was temp help. Temporary help has been a superb leading indicator of employment over the last few decades. Despite weak employment data the last 5 months continue to show a positive trend:
2012-06: 2,533.6
2012-05: 2,508.4
2012-04: 2,489.8
2012-03: 2,469.1
2012-02: 2,482.3
Cullen Roche
Mr. Roche is the Founder of Orcam Financial Group, LLC. Orcam is a financial services firm offering research, private advisory, institutional consulting and educational services.
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1 Comment
Well, to make this nice picture set complete, you would need to add some numbers on historic ratio between full-time and part-time jobs, hours worked in two categories and explanation how first graph is related to the second one. Otherwise, it would be a classic case of comparison of apples to oranges, with the oranges being absent…..
Simple example: let’s imagine that during “historic” times every 100 job additions in temps would correspond to 50 job additions in permanent category. And during this “recovery” every 100 additions in temps correspond to 50 job lost in permanent. Now, the development does not look that “positive”.
Also, regarding the temps – 12-02 to 12-03 does not show positive dynamic. Quite interesting, especially taking into account “unusually warm weather” effect.