Jobless Claims Halve Under Biden
Jobless claims fell again last week, the government said Thursday.
444,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ended May 15, the fewest of the pandemic era (figure below). The previous week's total was revised marginally higher.
The four-week moving average fell to 504,750, the lowest since March 14, 2020.
Initial claims have fallen by around half since Joe Biden took office. The US is now 250,000 below the pre-pandemic record set in 1982.
It was the fifth week in six tha
An odd trend in engineering job specs is that employers seem to be asking for technicians. Since the employers have the funding, why not write the job description as a request for technicians? (Well obviously, if technicians are paid more, then there should be sufficient funding for good pay for the factory floor folks. Then the sky’s the limit for engineering pay!)
One recently e-mailed job description requested: basic theoretical radio-astronomy experience, Linux OS installation expertise, and welding (both TIG and MIG) certification. I’m planning to advise the recruiter that yes, I want to send in my resume (although I know nothing about welding). At the very least, I want to interview the people who wrote that job description.
Data point
Lovely!
Well we will find out a lot when enhanced unemployment benefits roll off in September and in person school comes back in the fall. I also believe there is going to be a second order effect damaging white collar employment coming soon. In businesses whose decline has been accelerated, many businesses have held onto workers during the pandemic to make sure work gets done and morale is somewhat less damaged while remote working. My guess is that this will come to an end very shortly as well. We could well see something of a rebound in service employment , while white collar work for larger companies decline at the same time. Meanwhile work that involves making, building and maintaining real things make a bounce. Nope the volatility in the labor market is not going to end soon.
I agree (see my previous response … “the sky’s the limit” comment on engineering/white collar pay was snarky). I think the people responsible for real-life builds & maintenance may have more job stability – typically that kind of work in at companies that are classified as “industrial”, not “technical”.
“white collar work for larger companies decline at the same time” would bode very ill for consumer spending. The PTON bikes, LULU leggings, and LEN houses are mostly bought by those same white collar workers.
Something to remember about the dichotomy between service and manufacturing employment is that those terms are fairly misleading because while service businesses are fairly easy to classify, most of workers at manufacturing firms are actually service employees of the white collar type like financial services, accounting, human resources, IT engineering, and so forth.
I got a glimpse of the future last week when my daughter’s employer, an international digital ad agency sent all of its employees to the office for two days to get all of their stuff and take it home. While a few IT and ad production personnel would eventually return to reconfigured space to maintain the firm’s large internal cloud and data warehouse, for the foreseable future all the rest of the firm”s employees would be working from home with occasional trips to one of a few physical conference rooms when some face to face time is needed. Her husband’s employer, the largest in the city, has closed most of its space, leasing most of it to other tenants, is reshuffling management and looking to a highly modified future.