Friday Musings on the Job Market

The national Jobs Report came out this morning showing, nationwide, a net gain of 97,000 jobs, coming in almost right on projections. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.5%, beating expectations. This is alleviating a lot of fear that it could have been much worse. Here in the Pittsburgh area, very unofficially, we are seeing one of the biggest booms unfolding in the hourly employment arena in over 5 years. We say unofficially because we do not do our own local surveys, but based on our business climate we predict some pretty healthy LOCAL numbers will be reported in a month or two to come. We are seeing healthy business increases in some temporary personnel companies that also support optimism. Stay Tuned! It has already been predicted locally by officials that this could be a relative break-out year for the Pittsburgh area job market due to final absorption last year of the US Air job cuts.