Funny how Marketwatch buried these two stories without fanfare. When unemployment claims were falling due to seasonal adjustments they had blaring bold headlines about the tremendous jobs recovery. Now unemployment claims have risen for THREE straight weeks and there is barely a peep. How about the data from Challenger & Gray? ANNOUNCED job cuts are up 18% in the first two months over last year. WTF??? I thought the jobs market was doing fabulous. Obama tells me so. Every freaking news station tells me we are having strong jobs growth. Isn’t the unemployment rate plummeting? The BLS wouldn’t lie.
It seems these inconvenient facts don’t fit into the current storyline being peddled to the masses. Back to your regularly scheduled propaganda.
U.S. weekly jobless claims climb 8,000 to 362,000
By Jeffry Bartash
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Jobless claims in the U.S. rose to the highest level in five weeks, climbing by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 362,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had estimated claims would rise to 355,000 in the week ended March 3. Claims from two weeks ago were revised up to 354,000 from 351,000. The four-week average of claims, meanwhile, rose by a scant 250 to 355,000. The monthly average smoothes out seasonal quirks and provides a more accurate view of labor-market trends. Continuing claims – payments to people already approved for jobless benefits – increased by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 3.42 million in the week ended Feb. 25. Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag. About 7.39 million people received some kind of state or federal benefit in the week ended Feb. 18, down 111,222 from the prior week. Total claims are reported with a two-week lag and are not seasonally adjusted.
Feb. layoff announcements fall 3%: Challenger
By Steve Goldstein
card802 says:
Speaking of failed MSM, hate to bring this up again but more news on the birth certificate.
Seems as though the pressure is mounting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrQp6qSgX_I&feature=youtu.be
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8th March 2012 at 11:02 am
Administrator says:
Truth from Gallup versus the Lies that will be spread by the BLS tomorrow:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/153161/Unemployment-February.aspx
March 8, 2012
U.S. Unemployment Up in February
Underemployment is 19.1%, up from 18.7% in January
by Dennis Jacobe, Chief EconomistPRINCETON, NJ — U.S. unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 9.1% in February from 8.6% in January and 8.5% in December.
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8th March 2012 at 12:49 pm
TeresaE says:
Wow, is it time already?
Time for my new favorite pastime:
What isn’t the MSM/gubment telling me?
or my uber favorite:
How much crap can we feed the masses before somebody notices that it is all lies?
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8th March 2012 at 1:14 pm
TeresaE says:
On a more serious note, and the real reason I hopped in here until I couldn’t control myself.
Two weeks ago we finally broke down and bought new cell phones.
We got them at Costco and both young men staffing the cell phone kiosk mentioned their hours had been slashed – hard.
Yep, Costco sales are up, but what they aren’t pointing out is that a big chunk of these increased sales are SNAP recipients and inflation.
Oh the success the Great and Powerful O has brought us. All hail the fixer of economies and uniter of foreign lands.
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8th March 2012 at 1:17 pm
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
Here’s all ya’ gotta know.
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8th March 2012 at 2:41 pm
AWD says:
I wonder what the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese “labor force participation” rates are? How many people in Asia on Welfare, disability, unemploymnent? ZIP.
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8th March 2012 at 2:56 pm
marissa says:
Here is a job hunting experience I had yesterday, I put this post up on a foreign website where I talk to my overseas friends in the middle of the night.
——
“I am in the job market. I have been filling out online job applications. In the US it is well known that computer scanners go through online applications looking for ‘keywords’ used by the applicant, the use of which will move the process forward, the lack of use of such keywords will kill the application. The online applications are timed as well, and include *personality* tests.
So I get through Round 1 online application. I am contacted by a company computerized robocall to get in touch with a toll free number and include a certain job identification code. So I did. At this toll free number I reach a voice recognition system which asks me a few questions–press 1 for yes and 9 for no–and advises me the call will be forwarded to a representative for a telephone interview. I wait.
A real person connects! She says her name is Beth and the interview may be monitored for quality purposes and she will ask questions and enter my answers. She says she is not allowed to chat with me but that there may be some delays as she types my answers to the questions. “Describe a team project you have worked on and the results of that project.”
I’m thinking….over a lifetime of work history…..I can hear Beth breathing….
and I begin babbling something about working together under difficult circumstances to bring a project to successful completion before the expected finish date (hoping to hit more keywords)–and some crap–and she has other such robo-monotonous “How would you respond if….” blah blah blah. We finish. She says goodbye.
Dear.fricking.god.
Is this what America has come to, robointerviews, and keyword associations and remote voice recognition conversations with computer programs?
This will not end well. You cannot run a business or a country (full of humans) on algorithms and binary codes and expect a rosy outcome.”
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8th March 2012 at 3:37 pm
Muck About says:
@Marissa: That’s absolutely awful…. I’ve personally hired people at arms length after reading a resume and then running a telephone interview (I was out in the Marshall Islands at the time and it’s hard to have applicants come it!).
Probably did a total of 20 between two contracts out there over a 7 years period.
Blew it one time. The applicants wife turned out to be a real killer bitch. The position was “unaccompanied” and she wouldn’t accept it. Paid her own way from Honolulu to Kwajalein on a commercial jet, got off on Kwajalein (which you can’t do without an invitation). I had to go to the airport and straighten it out.
That “straighten it out” was having the local security officers bodily place both wife and job applicant back on the plane and sending them on their way.
If I were treated the way you were with the robotics bit, I’d write the companies HR department a nice letter and advise them if they ever get their head out of their ass, give you a call and you’ll consider making a normal application.
MA
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8th March 2012 at 5:15 pm
marissa says:
It really is quite chilling isn’t it, muck?
In my original posting on the foreign website I got this hilarious response from someone
“Ouch. Good luck in your search. I hope you are a proactive, goal-oriented team player who can monitor her own performance against quality benchmarks, and that you display personal initiative within the framework of organisational policies and protocols. Or something like that.”
Hahahaha. Keywords, yes indeed.
I’m learning to be a parrot. Polly want a cracker?
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8th March 2012 at 5:57 pm
Novista says:
marissa
Things started getting weird a long while back. I knew a fellow student at Uni of Cincinnati, a headhunter. He told me he often puts phony ads in the paper so he always had a rolodex of prospects to aim at employers.
And later, there were the personality profile tests. The classic question I found on one: “Would you rather watch wrestling on TV or go to a live performance of the ballet.” You know what they thought they were looking for. Sheesh. That one had already been debunked in the one course I had on psychological tests and measurements. Needless to say, though this was the final step to employment, I reckoned they were not worth working for, so I remarked my answers to skew the whole thing the ‘wrong’ way.
Best job I never got in Australia much later: between jobs and learned a supervising engineer I’d worked for was in Queensland. Called him up, yeah, he needed someone with my qualifications. All I had to was send the usual paperwork for the station manager to approve. But no, that worthy recognized my credentials and work history — but wouldn’t hire me because I was not working in the industry! Go figure.
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8th March 2012 at 10:20 pm
TeresaE says:
I was once certified in employment law and was forced to participate in HR conferences where they were rolling out all these great tests and technology that would make the hiring experience “a no-brainer.”
Thirteen years later, I see it has worked!
As a recruiter, a large part of my job was counseling the applicants. Counsel on resumes, appearance, testing, interview skills and the like.
The first thing I always pointed out was that your resume is NOT supposed to tell your life story, it has one purpose – and one only – to get you an interview. Now it is done with scanners, but then resume ranking was done with the least experienced person in the place – usually a receptionist.
So, if your resume says you are a “Cash Disbursements Clerk” and you can’t get an interview as an Accounts Payable Clerk, it is NOT because you can’t do the job. It IS because some idiot – or computer – does not know that the two titles mean virtually the same thing. Lesson #1 – ALWAYS alter your resume to fit the wording of the job posting or industry. Always.
Marissa, I don’t know where you live, or what type work you are trying for, but I can tell you that shooting resumes/applications over the computer cannot be the most effective way to get a job. The scuttle on the street is that a legitimate job ad will bring dozens, if not hundreds, of semi-qualified responses and yours gets lost in the mix.
I’ve always been a huge fan of faxing resumes directly to hiring managers. It takes some time and effort, and sometimes a little sleuthing and deception, but from experience I know that the hiring manager has hundreds of electronic files but few faxed or mailed resumes. The fax stack of papers ALWAYS gets dealt with first.
Good luck. Job hunting has risen a few more circles in Dante’s hell.
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8th March 2012 at 1:38 pm