Hiring Plans Up

Here is a little good news on the job growth side.

U.S. employers will maintain a brisk hiring pace for the third quarter, according to the quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey. Twenty percent of companies surveyed intend to hire workers in the third quarter, on a seasonally-adjusted net basis, matching second-quarter hiring plans that were the most optimistic since early 2001.

That's up from a net hiring outlook of 7 percent a year ago, said Barbara Beck, executive vice president of North America operations at Manpower, the staffing firm.

The seasonally-adjusted net employment figure is derived from the percentage of firms planning to hire minus those intending layoffs. It does not measure the number of jobs. Manpower surveys almost 16,000 U.S. companies on their hiring plans each quarter.

"Employers are feeling confident that the recovery has legs," Beck said. "Most employers have a higher level of confidence at this point, far exceeding what they had a year ago. "The fact that employers are feeling as optimistic going into the third quarter as they did going into second quarter is an indication that this is a true recovery," she said.

This is a survey of hiring intentions, not set-in-stone edicts. "There are always factors ... that may alter their behavior. There is a whole lot of scrutiny right now on interest rates and economic uncertainty," Beck said. Still, historically "the correlation is very tight between what employers say they're going to do (in the survey) and what they actually do," Beck said.

The Labor Department reported a gain of almost 250,000 jobs in May. Thus far in 2004, about 1.2 million jobs have been created, versus the 2.7 million jobs lost between March 2001 and August 2003.

Still, many Americans continue to struggle with long-term unemployment. Last month, 1.8 million unemployed Americans had been without a job for 6 months or more, according to the Labor Department.

Those long-term unemployed were 21.9 percent of the total 8.2 million unemployed, almost the highest percentage since the early 1980s.

More here.