Job Market

In a country where the economy is slowing and the job market is slimming, tens of thousands of Americans are out of work. Journalists are among them. Hundreds of journalists are out of jobs from cuts made in the Times-Mirror newspaper chain - owners of the Los Angeles Times and the recently folded New York Newsday - and the closing of The Houston Post. Hundreds of other jobs hang in the balance after members of the Newspaper Guild, the Teamsters and four other unions struck The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press more than five weeks ago. But in the midst of all this, the National Association of Black Journalists is holding its annual job fair at the Marriott Hotel in Center City.

New claims for state unemployment insurance rose in the latest week to the highest level in almost five months, the U.S. Labor Department said yesterday. The increase of 33,000 in the week ended March 27 was not anticipated by economists and is a continuing sign of weakness in the job market. Pennsylvania was the state with the biggest rise nationally in the week ended March 20, the latest week for which individual state figures were available. The report said claims in Pennsylvania that week by individuals newly out of work increased by 1,847 to 20,777.

A Camden County plan to provide welfare recipients with job training, medical treatment, day care, transportation and the political clout to find a job has the potential to become a model for the region. State Commissioner of Human Services Drew Altman, who is a recognized innovator in the area of welfare reform, has approved phased-in state support that could be worth $15 million a year to Camden County by 1991. In so doing, he lauded Freeholder Director Robert Andrews and other county leaders for coming up with "an ambitious and innovative program to help poor people.

No matter what happens to the U.S. economy, two Philadelphia personnel companies sit on opposite ends of the employment seesaw - one up, the other down. These days, CDI Corp., a billion-dollar global recruiting company, sits at the bottom. "Companies have put their hiring on hold," said Allen Salikof, president of Management Recruiters International Inc., a CDI division and the largest management recruiting business in the nation, according to industry figures. With many companies laying off instead of hiring - 2.7 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last two years - there's less need for CDI's services and more for those of Right Management Consultants Inc., which provides job-search services for laid-off workers globally.

The unemployment news is awful, with 524,000 lost jobs in December and 11 million Americans out of work. But Stephen Emerson, who runs a Cherry Hill-based temporary-staffing business, sees a glimmer of hope in his fourth-quarter results. The shred of optimism comes from a slight uptick in business in the last three months of an otherwise ghastly 2008. "If we can maintain the status quo - not even go up - it seems as if the rest of the market could be on the heels of that," said Emerson, chief executive of Emerson Personnel Group.

When the salon where she styled hair closed this month, Leslie Kriebel, who also drives a school bus and prepares meals as a personal chef, decided the time had come to do something different. So she applied for work at Wegmans, the premium supermarket chain, which has 550 job openings at a store it will open in Collegeville in October. "Food still seems to be selling, thank God," said Kriebel, 48, who lives in Telford. Kriebel's passion for food makes her an attractive prospect, but she faces plenty of competition during a recession that has pushed unemployment from 4.9 percent a year ago to more than 8 percent and thrown 5 million out of work.

Last summer, Krupa Patel, an information-technology specialist who graduated from Gwynedd-Mercy College in 2002, noticed something about her former classmates. Her fellow IT graduates were starting to land jobs in the field, after doing low-paid time behind the counters of the area's shopping malls. The pickup in IT hiring is the brightest spot in what appears to be a softening labor market, according to a salary survey conducted by the MidAtlantic Employers' Association, a group of 700 small and midsize privately held companies in the city, its Pennsylvania and New Jersey suburbs, Delaware, and the Lehigh Valley.

Faced with rising interest rates, the stock market took a spill in heavy trading yesterday. This came despite signs of a strengthening job market. The Dow Jones average of 30 industrials fell 36.20 points to 3,268.96, for its biggest decline since it dropped 39.45 points on Oct. 9. Other, broader market measures showed less dramatic losses. Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones by about 8 to 5 on the New York Stock Exchange. Big Board volume came to an estimated 303.15 million shares as of 4 p.m., against 288.53 million on Wednesday.

Despite battlefield successes, the U.S. job market appears paralyzed as the war rages in Iraq. New jobless claims in the United States rose to their highest level in nearly a year, the federal government reported yesterday. They increased by 38,000 to 445,000 for the week ended March 29, the highest number since mid-April 2002. "Companies are still focusing on cutting costs rather than putting out the welcome mat for new employees," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist with Banc of America Capital Management in St. Louis.

In case you haven't noticed - and many haven't - the job market is improving. More people are working in Chester County, and fewer people are collecting unemployment. What's more, after two years of white-collar layoffs, there are the first signs of an upturn in jobs for managers and professionals, according to the head of the state Labor Department's Coatesville office. One reason the change isn't that noticeable: More of the jobs are temporary. "This is the first real turnaround in the professional ranks in two years," said Doug Schmidt, director of the Chester County Job Center in Coatesville.