Relief to despair: Views of jobs data vary

Photo

Photo by: AP FILE PHOTO, DEC. 12, 2011

People wait to talk with potential employers at a job fair sponsored by National Career Fairs in New York. Month by month, the U.S. job market is regaining its health.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

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 21/2 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, 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.”

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.

THE CAUTIOUS, 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.

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, he says, businesses that sell goods overseas have been a bright spot.

THE DISCOURAGED

Job-seekers still face tough odds. There are still more than four unemployed Americans, on average, for every job opening.

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.

“You can send out 10 r sum s and get one — and that’s a maybe,” she says.