Unemployment trends continue upward

09.10.09
By Timothy Jones

With many Americans facing credit card debt and trying to stop foreclosure, the last thing they need is negative employment figures, but that seems to continue to be the case as a new report from the Conference Board finds that employment trends continue to sink.

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index for August fell 0.1 percent from July's revised number of 88.2 and now stands at 88.1 - an 18.5 percent decline over the same period last year.

Although the downward trend in employment is not a positive sign, the Conference Board noted that some elements of the index - which is a composite of eight employment indicators - have seen improvements over the last month.

The research group said the percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get" improved over July's figures while industrial production, a figure gathered from the Federal Reserve, and real manufacturing and trade sales, from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, also looked better in August.

However, Gad Levanon, senior economist at the Conference Board, said the latest round of figures indicated that the country is unlikely to see an increase in jobs until 2010.

"The flatness of the Employment Trends Index in recent months suggests that we won't see job growth until the end of the year," he said. "The fact that the index cannot get off the ground is another sign of a weak recovery, perhaps a jobless one."

The Conference Board Index comes on the heels of last week's unemployment rate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics which rose 0.3 percentage points to 9.7 percent. Many analysts expect unemployment to continue to rise into 2010 with even the White House predicting that jobless rate to peak above 10 percent sometime next year.

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Many Americans are still looking for work