Month by month, the U.S. job market is regaining its health.
So many jobs are being added that the unemployment rate has dropped for five straight months. At 8.3 percent, it’s at a three-year low.
Whether the job market actually feels stronger, though, depends on your perspective.
The headline numbers mask vast disparities _ from the New Yorker thrilled to have found a catering job to the Indianapolis truck driver forced to take a 40 percent pay cut to work again.
Even where hiring has picked up, scars from the Great Recession remain. In Fort Madison, Iowa, Pinnacle Foods Group is expanding a canned-meat plant and adding 65 jobs. Yet that same work used to be done at a company plant in Tacoma, Wash., that once employed 160 but has since closed.
A government report Friday that employers added a surprising 243,000 jobs in January ignited cheers for the job market, which had been slow to recover in the 2 1/2 years since the recession officially ended. Many economists see signs of a self-fulfilling “virtuous cycle,” in which more jobs fuel more consumer spending, which sparks further hiring and spending and more jobs.
The presidential election is sure to be determined, in part, by how Americans interpret the shifts in the job market.
Here’s how things look to employers, job seekers and analysts with varying views of the job market:
_ THE RELIEVED AND THE HOPEFUL
Robb Stiffler landed a job two weeks ago at Crown College, a liberal arts college in St. Bonifacius, Minn. He makes sure rooms are available and set up for school events. Stiffler used to run his own company selling paint sprayers. But the housing bust put him out of business.
Then, in nine months in real estate, he sold one house. At first, he lived off his credit cards. Then it was unemployment benefits.
He was elated to get the Crown job, his first to provide a retirement plan. Unemployment, he says, “was agony.”
Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co. is opening a plant in Galax, Va., near the North Carolina border. It expects to hire 50 workers by July and perhaps 65 more over the next year or two.
January’s buoyant national job numbers “play right into what we have already sensed and begun to act on,” says Doug Bassett, the chief operating officer.
The company’s revenue has risen 20 percent in the past two months compared with the same period a year earlier. Vaughan-Bassett credits an improving economy, rising interest in U.S.-made products and higher prices on Chinese imports it competes with.
Across the country, Ancestry.com, which helps track family lineage, expects to add 150 employees this year _ if it can find them.
The company, based in Provo, Utah, must compete with technology firms for engineers with expertise in artificial intelligence and in handling mountains of data (30 million family trees in Ancestry’s case).
“It’s only gotten harder” to find qualified applicants as the job market has improved, says Eric Shoup, senior vice president. “The likes of Google, Zynga, Facebook and others are also growing. They are soaking these people up.”
James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, says the stock market’s celebration of Friday’s jobs report was another step in reversing Americans’ economic pessimism.
“For me, the takeaway isn’t so much about the healing of the job market as it is about the beginning of an attitude adjustment for this country,” Paulsen said.
Michael Biggers of Brooklyn, N.Y., was happy to land a job recently at a catering company.
The job hunt took four months. Unemployment benefits helped pay the bills. And his four kids, ages 3 to 12, loved having him home. Biggers, 32, just wishes he didn’t have to apply for jobs online.
“I feel like I would have found something faster if I met with a person face to face,” Biggers says. “I’m just confident about me.”
Perhaps no one has more reason to applaud the improving job numbers than President Barack Obama. His re-election hopes rest heavily on whether most voters will agree that the economy has improved on his watch.
“The recovery is speeding up,” Obama said after the January employment report was released.
_ THE CAUTIOUS AND THE SKEPTICAL
In a few weeks, entrepreneur Joe Wong will open a restaurant overseeing the Sacramento River in Redding, Calif. The eatery, View 202, will employ 100.
But Wong, president of J&A Food Service, isn’t convinced the economy is improving. He knows he’ll have to keep menu prices down to attract the budget-conscious. Unemployment still exceeds 11 percent in Redding.
“We’ll probably have 1,000 apply” for jobs, Wong says. The January jobs report is “going to get everybody excited. But we’ve heard it before. It just comes back down.”
Farther south, the economy is only starting to improve in California’s Riverside and San Bernardino counties, an area that was clobbered when housing prices plunged.
“We still have large numbers of foreclosures on the books, and property values and sales taxes are also lagging behind projections,” says Tom Freeman, a Riverside County commissioner.
At least, Freeman says, businesses that sell goods overseas have been a bright spot.
In downtown Indianapolis, Windsor Jewelry hired a part-time worker for the holidays, then made him full-time as demand held up. Owner Greg Bires says he might hire another person this year. Business is a little steadier now.
Still, rising gold prices have pinched the company.
“That’s been the biggest problem _ just not knowing what tomorrow was going to bring,” Bires says. “So we’ve been kind of afraid to make any major changes.”
Among the highest-profile skeptics of an improving job market is Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner in the presidential race.
On Friday, Romney blamed Obama’s policies for slowing the recovery, hurting families and making it harder for businesses to rebound.
“And for that,” Romney said at a campaign stop in Nevada, “the president deserves the blame that he’ll receive in this campaign.”
_ THE DISCOURAGED
Job seekers still face tough odds. There are still more than four unemployed Americans, on average, for every job opening. In a healthy economy, by contrast, that ratio would be roughly 2-to-1.
Sara Pereda, an executive assistant in New York City’s entertainment industry, has applied for several job openings and received no responses, even though she’s sure she was qualified. The same for many of her friends. Pereda, 30, has been seeking a job with more opportunity for advancement.
“You can send out 10 resumes and get one _ and that’s a maybe,” Pereda says.
In Buffalo, N.Y., Rosanne DiPizio, vice president of her family’s DiPizio Construction, says there isn’t enough work for her company to justify hiring right now. It relies mostly on government road-construction contracts. And governments have been cutting back.
DiPizio also runs a concrete plant that would normally employ 100. It’s down to 85.
“We will employ more if we have more work,” she says. “It’s that simple.”
Jeff Searcy says fewer people are showing up at a support group he runs for job hunters at a church in Charlotte, N.C. Searcy isn’t sure why. The area is suffering from 9.9 percent unemployment, far above the national average.
“We know it’s not because everyone has found a job,” Searcy says.
His theory?
“After you’ve been to 10 lectures on networking, how much more can you learn?”
Aaron Cruz of Indianapolis says that while hiring has picked up, there’s a catch: Landing a job can mean accepting part-time work or a pay cut. Cruz lost his job as a truck driver in December 2008. He didn’t find full-time work again until last June.
His old job paid $23 an hour; his new one, $14.
“The money I’m making now at this new job … I made in my mid-20s,” he says. “I’m 42 now.”
He doesn’t put much stock in better employment numbers. People forced to take part-time jobs once they exhaust their unemployment aid, Cruz notes, aren’t counted as unemployed. Yet they still struggle.
“Every time I hear them, I doubt the numbers,” he says.
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Dow Chemical Co. said Thursday it posted a loss in the fourth-quarter because of a one-time charge that caused it to pay higher taxes at its Brazilian operations.
Shares fell nearly 3 percent in trading before the opening bell.
The Midland, Mich. company, the nation’s largest chemical maker, reported a loss of $20 million, or 2 cents per share, compared with a year-ago profit of $426 million, or 37 cents per share. Excluding a charge of 27 cents per share, Dow would have earned 25 cents per share in the quarter.
Revenue rose 2 percent to $14.1 billion.
Results were below Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts polled by FactSet expected a profit, excluding items, of 31 cents per share on revenue of $14 Business Card Holders.18 billion.
Volume fell 3 percent in the quarter. Demand slipped as customers in North America, Europe and other regions worked through existing inventory instead of replenishing their stockpiles. Dow says it saw global economic “deterioration” in the period, with “considerable weakness” in Western Europe. Europe accounts for a quarter of the company’s sales.
Prices rose 5 percent, offsetting higher feedstock and energy costs.
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The head of AT&T on Thursday suggested that the company might sell its directory business, which employs more than 500 people in St. Louis.
The company also reported a $6.68 billion loss for the December quarter, fueled largely by a $4 billion cancellation charge paid after the failure of its planned purchase of T-Mobile.
But the loss also included a non-cash charge of about $2.9 billion to reflect the falling value of its directory business, which includes the Yellow Pages phone book and its Internet incarnation.
AT&T expects earnings per share to grow by a mid-single-digit percentage in 2012, a bit lower than analysts had expected.
In a morning conference call with analysts, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson labeled the directory business as underperforming.
“That’s one area that we’re going to obviously take a very hard look at, and while I don’t want to give any indication on M&A activity, it’s one of these areas that we’re going to have to decide, do we keep it, do we restructure it, as we move forward,” he said. M&A means mergers and acquisitions, the buying and selling of companies.
AT&T declined to give any further details on the directory business presence in St guaranteed high risk personal loans. Louis, or the company’s intentions. It also declined to say how many people the business employed locally.
However, that business employs 575 union members in St. Louis, plus management personnel, said Jim Kolve, executive vice president of Communications Workers of America Local 6300. The local workers handle sales, accounting, customer service and part of production, working on both the print director and the Internet.
AT&T’s directory business is the most profitable in the industry, said analyst Juli Niemann of Smith Moore & Co.
“This was a cash cow feeding tons into the company,” she said.
The phone company might use money from the sale to fund upgrades of its phone system and build its video business.
“They have big debt and an underfunded pension,” Niemann said. “They need the cash.”
The directory business is part of AT&T’s Advertising Solutions unit, which reported quarterly revenue of $781 million versus $926 million a year earlier.
Associated Press contributed to this report
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said the U.S. economy is not yet at
Ever since oil was discovered in the North Sea off the British coast in December 1969, the Scottish National Party claimed it for Scotland.
Now in power and closer than ever to a referendum on whether to break from the U.K. after more than 300 years, the SNP government in Edinburgh led by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is counting on tax revenue from the oil industry as a key pillar of the economy along with financial services.
Raw fish and cough medicine may not seem like they should occupy the same store, but a select few Walgreens now carry both.
In 2009 Walgreen Co., based in a Chicago suburb, announced it would elevate food offerings at some of its most prominent stores, in downtown Chicago, on Wall Street and elsewhere. Those stores – designed to trumpet that the century-plus-old pharmacy chain was entering new, more rarified terrain – now have sushi bars, $400 bottles of wine, cigar humidors and made-to-order smoothies.
But the company also promised it would fill more shelf space, including here in St. Louis, with cheaper, less esoteric offerings, especially in areas where low-income residents have little access to nutritious or fresh food. Walgreens plans to turn at least 500 of its 7,800 U.S. stores, most in low-income neighborhoods, into what the company is calling “food oases.”
“We found that in lower-income areas, in food deserts, that grocery stores have moved out,” said Bryan Pugh, the company’s vice president of merchandising. “It’s a very strategic initiative. Food brings the shopper in more often.”
So far the company has expanded offerings, including fresh produce, at a modest 35 stores in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Oakland and Indianapolis. But it plans to expand to other cities over the next five years. The company aims to boost food offerings in some of its 110 St. Louis-area stores by 2013, Pugh said, noting that it has already rolled out new in-house food brands that are on store shelves already.
“We’re overhauling all our brands,” Pugh said.
Walgreens is not the only retailer who says it will bring fresh produce to under-served areas in St. Louis and beyond. Save-A-Lot stores have said they will open 500 stores in these neighborhoods in the five years, and Wal-Mart has made a similar commitment, saying it will open as many as 300 by 2016. But Walgreens already has a major presence in low-income urban areas, with stores already in place, making its efforts easier to execute, analysts note.
Walgreens’ move, analysts say, could help the company keep customers Walgreens is losing after the company’s split from pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts. Walgreens stands to lose billions in sales as customers fill their prescriptions elsewhere.
“It’s really interesting timing, because Walgreens can re-establish themselves with people who can no longer fill their prescription there,” said supermarket analyst, Phil Lempert. “It’s: What can we sell them to keep them coming to our store, until they make the transition to Medicare?”
While Walgreens acknowledges that the move is strategic, it also says it has good intentions of providing fresh produce to nutrition-poor areas where fast food is usually the only source of calories. Nutritionists and critics, however, question how successful that effort could be.
“A lot of this is overblown,” said David Livingston, an analyst and supermarket industry researcher. “They already had some food items. They’re adding a few more. They’re adding a few more perishables. Are they really making a difference? I don’t think so.”
Walgreens says it will expand the space it devotes to food by 35 to 40 percent in some of its stores. But, Livingston notes, that translates to roughly 400 square feet. “That’s 20 by 20,” Livingston said. “That’s the size of my bathroom.”
Livingston and other analysts point out that grocery stores pulled out of these neighborhoods for a reason. “If there’s money to be made selling fresh produce, grocery stores would have figured it out,” he said. “I wonder what they’re thinking.”
Marjorie Sawicki, and assistant professor of nutrition and dietetics at Saint Louis University, said she believes Walgreens produce may make a small dent in nutrition-poor diets.
“Where we have food deserts, if there are fruits and vegetables, it might help, because there’s a Walgreens on every block,” Sawicki said. “If they displace items that are filled with sodium and fat, then it could have a benefit. It depends on how they emphasize the food.”
Bringing healthy food to under-served neighborhoods will require a more holistic approach, Sawicki says. “I think it’s a Band-Aid,” she said. “What we need to be looking at is creating community investment so people can access healthy food at a fair price and support the person who grew it. But that’s going to take time.”
Sawicki pointed to other efforts to bring produce to under-served areas, such as The North City Food Co-Op, as better models. Other new additions to the market landscape in St. Louis food deserts include YOURS Market, which opened in the Baden neighborhood in late 2010.
Still, Walgreens sees an opportunity.
The company did extensive research to determine which stores should sell more food. “Different stores have different trends,” Pugh said. “If I’m on a corner, near a Dominick’s, a Target and a Walmart , I’ll probably do better with beauty (products) there. I’ll look at my data by category and see if I’ve got traffic and I’m selling food. You can’t put fresh food in a store that’s not busy.”
The company’s plan, Pugh said, is not to expand the stores, but to devote more existing space to food. “We’re already in those areas,” he said. “We are the health care oasis there.”
Lempert says he believes that’s a smart strategy.
“I think it’s fascinating that for years drug chains had the lowest price for milk, that was their loss leader – what they did to get people in,” Lempert said. “Now they’ve leap-frogged milk, and said we can do this bigger and better.”
“We buy food 2.2 times a week, so if they can get more traffic in these stores, they sell more product,” Lempert added. “Supermarket sales are either flat or declining, and if you look at drug-store food sales, they’re through the roof.”
New Zealand police raided several homes and businesses linked to the founder of Megaupload.com, a giant Internet file-sharing site shut down by U.S. authorities, on Friday and seized guns, millions of dollars, and nearly $5 million in luxury cars, officials said.
Police arrested founder Kim Dotcom and three Megaupload employees on U.S. accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. Extradition proceedings against them could last a year or more.
With 150 million registered users, about 50 million hits daily and endorsements from music superstars, Megaupload.com was among the world’s biggest file-sharing sites. According to a U.S. indictment, the site, which was shut down Thursday, earned Dotcom $42 million in 2010 alone.
Although the company is based in Hong Kong and Dotcom lives in New Zealand, some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Virginia, and that was enough for U.S. prosecutors to act.
New Zealand police served 10 search warrants at several businesses and homes around the city of Auckland.
Police spokesman Grant Ogilvie said the seized cars include a Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe worth more than $400,000 as well as several Mercedes. Two short-barreled shotguns and a number of valuable artworks were also confiscated, he added.
He said police seized more than $8 million, money that was invested in various New Zealand financial institutions and which has now been placed in a trust pending the outcome of the cases.
New Zealand’s Fairfax Media reported that the four defendants stood together in an Auckland courtroom in the first step of the extradition proceedings.
Dotcom’s lawyer raised objections to a media request to take photographs and video, but then Dotcom spoke out from the dock, saying he didn’t mind photos or video “because we have nothing to hide.” The judge granted the media access, and ruled that the four would remain in custody until a second hearing Monday.
Dotcom, Megaupload’s former CEO and current chief innovation officer, is a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany who had his name legally changed. The 37-year-old was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor.
Two other German citizens and one Dutch citizen also were arrested and three other defendants _ another German, a Slovakian and an Estonian _ remain at large.
Megaupload has retained Washington power attorney Bob Bennett to defend it, according to a person inside the company. Bennett is best known for representing former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The person within Megaupload spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the company’s plans.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends free speech and digital rights online, said in a statement that the arrests set “a terrifying precedent. If the United States can seize a Dutch citizen in New Zealand over a copyright claim, what is next?”
The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.
Before Megaupload was taken down, the company posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were “grotesquely overblown.”
“The fact is that the vast majority of Mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch,” the statement said.
Several sister sites were also shut down, including one dedicated to sharing pornography files.
News of the shutdown seemed to bring retaliation from hackers who claimed credit for attacking the Justice Department’s website. Federal officials confirmed it was down for hours Thursday evening and that the disruption was being “treated as a malicious act payday loans online.”
A loose affiliation of hackers known as “Anonymous” claimed credit for the attack. Also hacked was the site for the Motion Picture Association of America, which has campaigned for a crackdown on piracy.
According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the Internet. Current estimates by companies that monitor Web traffic place it in the top 100.
Megaupload is considered a “cyberlocker,” in which users can upload and transfer files that are too large to send by email. Such sites can have perfectly legitimate uses. But the Motion Picture Association of America estimated that the vast majority of content being shared on Megaupload was in violation of copyright laws.
The website allowed users to download some content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to people who wanted access to faster download speeds or extra content. The website also sold advertising.
Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.
The company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO. He was not named in the indictment and declined to comment through a representative.
The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing, and turned a blind eye to requests from copyright holders to remove copyright-protected files.
For instance, users received cash bonuses if they uploaded content popular enough to generate massive numbers of downloads, according to the indictment. Such content was almost always copyright protected, the indictment said.
The Justice Department said it was illegal for anyone to download pirated content, but their investigation focused on the leaders of the company, not end users who may have downloaded a few movies for personal viewing.
A lawyer who represented the company in a lawsuit last year declined to comment Thursday. Efforts to reach an attorney representing Dotcom were unsuccessful.
Although Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, the size of its operation in the southern Chinese city was unclear. The administrative contact listed in its domain registration, Bonnie Lam, did not respond immediately for a request for comment sent to a fax number and email address listed.
The indictment was returned in the Eastern District of Virginia, which claimed jurisdiction in part because some of the alleged pirated materials were hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Virginia. Prosecutors there have pursued multiple piracy investigations.
The Justice Department also was investigating the “significant increase in activity” that disrupted its website. It said in a statement that it was working to “investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause.”
The site appeared to be working again late Thursday. A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement that the group’s site also had been hacked, but it too appeared to be working later in the evening.
“The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech,” the spokesman said. “We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals.”
____
Matthew Barakat reported from McLean, Virginia. AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said Standard & Poor
China and the United States have pledged during a visit by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to cooperate on boosting the global economic recovery, but Chinese backing for U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil industry appeared unlikely.
China buys almost one-third of Iran’s oil exports and has rejected the U.S. sanctions as a tool to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program. That sets Washington up for a public setback if the government of the world’s second-largest economy refuses to cooperate.
Geithner was expected to make the U.S. case for sanctions in meetings Wednesday with Premier Wen Jiabao, Vice President Xi Jinping _ who is in line to become China’s next leader _ and Vice Premier Li Keqiang, another rising star.
Geithner met with his counterpart, Vice Premier Wang Qishan, on Tuesday night. He said he told Wang that the two sides “share so many important interests, and among those are increasing our cooperation on global economic issues.”
China’s official Xinhua News Agency said China and the United States pledged to further cooperate to boost the global economic recovery, and quoted Wang as saying the world economic situation is still “very complex and grim.”
Wang also called on the United States to loosen export controls of high-tech products to China, one of China’s complaints about the countries’ trade relationship. U.S. critics, meanwhile, say Chinese currency controls keep the yuan undervalued and give its exporters an unfair advantage, distorting trade at a time when Washington and other governments are under pressure to bring down unemployment.
China’s trade surplus with the United States widened 24.2 percent to $17.4 billion in December, according to data released Tuesday.
Geithner also is due to visit Tokyo, another major buyer of Iranian oil, for talks after he leaves Beijing on Thursday morning.
China has criticized U.S. sanctions on Iran, approved by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, as improper and ineffective. Beijing supported U.N. sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program but says action should be multilateral.
The sanctions would target Tehran’s oil industry by barring financial institutions from the U.S. market if they do business with Iran’s central bank.
China’s oil imports “have nothing to do with the nuclear issue,” a Chinese deputy foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, said Monday.
“We should not mix issues with different natures, and China’s legitimate concerns and demands should be respected,” Cui said.
Analysts in Beijing said China has no reason to go along with the sanctions. “China does not want to be seen as helping the U.S. when China’s own interest is concerned,” said Wang Lian, an Iran expert at Peking University’s School of International Relations.
He said Chinese opposition might be reinforced by Washington’s latest military strategy report published last week. It singles out Beijing as a power with the potential to affect the U.S. economy and security.
Industry analysts say that even if China agreed, it would face formidable challenges in trying to replace Iran as an oil source.
China’s fast-growing economy is the world’s biggest energy consumer and imports half its oil. Some 11 percent comes from Iran, or about 600,000 barrels per day in November, according to energy market analysts Argus Media.
Still, Geithner’s trip might not be wasted, because Washington is only starting a campaign to promote its sanctions, Peking University’s Wang said. He said China might face pressure to cooperate if other governments agree to comply.
“The U.S. is not wasting their efforts,” Wang said. “Pressuring China is what they can do, but it is fairly difficult to get China to stand on their side.”
American employers stepped up their hiring in December, bringing the unemployment rate down again.
The economy added 200,000 jobs in the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, closing out the year with 1.6 million jobs gained in 2011. Only 940,000 jobs were added the year before.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to 8.5%, its lowest level since February 2009.
"This is a good solid report, and the big message here is that 2011 was much better than 2010," said Scot Melland, CEO of Dice Holdings, a provider of career websites. "We’re headed in the right direction."
The encouraging news was coupled with revisions to the Labor Department’s data going back five years, which showed the unemployment rate has fallen for four consecutive months.
While private businesses have been adding jobs consistently since March 2010, the government has been slashing payrolls. In December, private employers added 212,000 jobs, and the public sector cut 12,000 jobs.
Young workers getting hired again
The manufacturing, health care and education industries were all bright spots in December, each adding more than 20,000 jobs cheap business cards. Even the construction industry, which had been bleeding jobs the two prior months, hired another 17,000 workers.
Jobs in retail and the food services were also on the rise, as were positions for couriers and messengers. In spite of the Labor Department’s seasonal adjustments, some analysts caution that these positions could be related to holiday hiring.
Still, more than 13 million people remain unemployed in the United States, and 42.5% of them have been so for six months or more.
Overall, the job market has a long way to go to fully recover from the financial crisis. The economy still needs to add about 6 million jobs to get back to 2008 employment levels.
Were you falling out of the middle class even before the Great Recession hit? Are you better or worse off than your parents? Do you have a job but still feel you aren’t upwardly mobile? Email realstories@cnnmoney.com with your name and phone number, and you could be featured in an upcoming story on CNNMoney.
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