Job Market

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.

Consumer spending, which has kept the U.S. economy afloat for the past year, may finally be faltering. Retail sales, factoring out the volatile automobile sector, were virtually flat in September, rising just 0.1 percent from the previous month, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. Including automobiles, they fell 1.2 percent. A separate report said consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level since 1993, a bad sign for spending in the coming months. Analysts worry that the growth of consumer spending may be slowing as consumers react to a flat job market, uncertainty about a war with Iraq, and shrinking 401(k)

Life wasn't supposed to turn out like this for Ildefonso Aviles. A hard- working father of five, he worked for 20 years at the Campbell Soup plant here until it closed in 1990. "That's when all my troubles started," he said. "The roof fell in on my head. " The next four years would become a series of part-time, temporary jobs and hand-to-mouth living for Aviles. He worked as a truck driver, a bus driver, then a self-employed mechanic. "I've done everything to survive except steal," he said.

Americans, rattled by a softening labor market and high gasoline prices, were less confident about the economy in August than at any time in the last nine months. The Conference Board said yesterday that its consumer confidence index dropped to 99.6 last month from 107.0 in July. Job-related worries were the big reason consumer confidence fell more than expected this month to its lowest level since November. In July, unemployment rose to a five-month high of 4.8 percent. In the Middle Atlantic states, the index fell this month to 73.7 from 81.4 in July.

The region's job market is expanding at a faster clip than normal, but is still lagging the nation's overall job growth. "We're looking pretty good, but let's hope gas prices don't go up any more," Lee Olson, labor market analyst with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, said yesterday. Some economists see higher gas prices as a threat to growth because they redirect money to the gas tank from other consumer purchases. According to the latest data available, the Philadelphia area created 18,800 jobs between March and April, 15 percent more than the average number of jobs created between March and April in recent years.

As a master's student at Yale, Kirk Hughes so admired his professors that he decided the life of academia would be the life for him. "I was so captivated and motivated by the clear thinking of the professors. It seemed an exciting and virtuous pastime," says Hughes, 37. So he did what one must to become a professor. Hughes spent three years at the University of Pennsylvania, working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature, then returned to New Haven, where his wife had a job, and he worked on his dissertation, a study of the resurgence of literary memoir writing.

Recession fears deepened yesterday as the government reported that the economy created just 18,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate hit 5 percent, the highest since Hurricane Katrina walloped the job market in 2005. The numbers sent Wall Street into a swoon and led President Bush to say he was considering an economic stimulus package. "We can't take economic growth for granted," he said. Tepid job growth increases the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will soon take action to drive interest rates lower in a bid to depressurize the economy by making borrowing cheaper for consumers and businesses.

The U.S. economy - which has been sputtering since the late summer - weakened in December as retailers and restaurants severely curtailed holiday hiring, government data showed yesterday. This slow hiring is why the U.S. Labor Department reported yesterday that the United States shed 101,000 jobs in December, reigniting concerns that the economic recovery is so shaky that it needs massive federal intervention. The report confirms that the U.S. economy has officially lost jobs for two consecutive years, the first back-to-back losses since 1957 and 1958, although 2002 was far better than 2001.

Those in the Northeastern United States have a dubious distinction: They live and work in the region hit hardest by national economic problems. Corporate restructuring and the recession got their start in the New England and mid-Atlantic states, and the effect on employment has been more profound in those regions than anywhere else, according to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis. Job losses in the Northeast, especially New England, began in late 1989, a full year before other regions of the country were affected.

Meteorologist John Bolaris was a media lightning rod when he worked at Channel 10: scattered brawls, flurries of name-calling, nights of deep canoodling. He's also the guy who, in 2001, hyped the big snowstorm that missed Philadelphia. So why - more than a year after he returned to Philadelphia after five years in New York - has there not been a dusting, or even a dustup? Friends say that the 51-year-old Bolaris, now chief meteorologist at Fox29, has grown up. The "new" John, they say, can be attributed to his daughter, Reina Sofia, a long-haired sprite who just turned 5. Bolaris shares custody with his former girlfriend Tiffany McElroy, a morning anchor in New York who briefly was a coworker at Channel 10. "Having a kid has slowed him down, in a good way," said Matt Cord, the WMMR radio personality and 76ers announcer.