- Employers add 120,000 jobs in March, By Jane M. Von Bergen, April 6, 2012, Philadelphia Inquirer: “The nation’s economy added 120,000 jobs in March – barely enough jobs to keep pace with population growth, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 8.2 percent. Economists say that the economy must generate anywhere between 100,000 and 175,000 jobs a month simply to keep up. That means that a month that adds just 120,000 jobs does nothing to erase the more than 10 million jobs lost or not created since the start of the recession in 2007…”
- U.S. hiring slowed sharply in March; unemployment fell to 8.2%, By Michael A. Fletcher, April 6, 2012, Washington Post: “The recent improvement in the nation’s job market slowed substantially in March as employers expanded payrolls by 120,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday. The number of new jobs fell far below economists’ estimates and marked the first time since November that employers added fewer than 200,000 jobs. Despite the disappointing numbers, the nation’s unemployment rate ticked down to 8.2 percent. Some analysts called the slowdown in hiring the result of an unusually warm winter that caused seasonal work, such as outdoor construction, to continue apace instead of slowing…”
- For long-term unemployed, help is running out, By Alan Greenblatt, April 6, 2012, National Public Radio: “Diane Turner can’t find work. She spent 30 years managing dental practices in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, but lost her last job in that field a couple of years ago. She worked for a while greeting customers at an auto body shop, but lost that job a year ago. ‘It was very depressing,’ Turner says. ‘I always worked, and I was always able to get a job.’ Having seen firsthand how competition for jobs is ‘absolutely fierce’ – more than 200 applicants sometimes turn up even when part-time jobs are listed – Turner is not surprised to learn that the unemployment rate is slow to come down. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the economy gained a net total of 120,000 jobs in March, and that the unemployment rate declined to 8.2 percent. Unemployment peaked in October 2009 at 10 percent. While the decline since has been slow, the fact that the numbers are trending down means that people who have been unemployed for an extended period, such as Turner, are going to have a harder time collecting benefits…”
- Georgia jobless benefits among briefest in nation, By Christopher Quinn and Dan Chapman, April 6, 2012, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Georgia’s payout period for unemployment benefits will soon be among the two shortest in the nation. A worker who loses a job after July, thanks to new state legislation to reduce hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to the federal government, will draw 14 to 20 weeks of checks, down from 26 weeks. The new sliding scale is based on the state unemployment rate. The lower the rate, the fewer the weeks of payments. More than 190,000 Georgians stand to lose anywhere from $260 to $1,820 in benefits, the nonprofit Georgia Budget and Policy Institute estimates…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty