SMG and the Pittsburgh Penguin organization are going above and beyond to help the Urban League and The Employment Guide organize and hold our next big diversity job fair at the Mellon Arena in July. The intent of the Penguins is to have an informational booth at the event to begin communicating with the community about their future needs for employees and integrating with their neighbors to make the development as Pittsburgh centric as possible. This shows their statements about concern for their neighbors are more than just words.
Hopefully, as completion of the new arena draws near and with it the development of land in the vicinity, informational booths will transition to become actual interviewing opportunities for hundreds of future hourly workers. The Penguins need to be commended for their pro-activity. As we draw closer to the event we will publicize the companies who will be in attendance. We expect 30 to 40 Pittsburgh area employers to be there.
We hate to be doom and gloom but the Port Authority cuts that might come down the road, let alone the one’s we just experienced, are going to severely impact hourly workers across Allegheny County. Some workers will simply lose their job. If you make $10.00 per hour and cannot afford $3.00 per gallon gas, let alone a car with parking, how else are you going to get to a job that is no longer going to be serviced by Pat? We have an organization in Pittsburgh that is trying to help. Commute Info will be at our upcoming job fair. Please seek them out.
In our last post we talked about not popping a cork yet over all the good news about our local job market and that it would be months before the early projections of growth could be verified. Well, maybe we can allow ourselves a little taste after the latest national and local survey reports that were just announced yesterday and today.
First the national report. Jobs nationally were reported to be up by 180,000. This is about 20,000 higher than the most optimistic forecasts. On top of this the past two months were revised higher by 32,000 jobs. According to MarketWatch reporter Greg Robb this is bewildering economists who feared, with the slowing economy, job creation would become anemic. The unemployment rate nationally dropped to 4.4% from 4.5%, matching the rate from last October.
For a fresh look at our local job market, we turn to a semi-annual survey of local small and mid-sized companies conducted by PNC Financial Services Group, as reported by the Post Gazette’s Elwin Green. This survey shows that 23% of local companies plan to add to their staff over the next six months, up from 15% from the last survey done in October. While there is concern over the reported reduction in the number of local jobseekers in February, often a sign of discouraged jobseekers pulling out of the job market, evidence continues to mount that we are in the early stages of one of the best job expansions in 6 years here in the Pittsburgh region. Most of the news we have read about over the past year speaks about how stagnant our area has been with a lack of job growth coupled with an aging population. The aging population (deaths have outnumbered births in our region by ten’s of thousand over the past 6 years) will continue for quite some time, but the Pittsburgh region could soon find itself in a position unthought-of of just a few years ago – a SHORTAGE of hourly workers.
SMG and the Pittsburgh Penguin organization are going above and beyond to help the Urban League and The Employment Guide organize and hold our next big diversity job fair at the Mellon Arena in July. The intent of the Penguins is to have an informational booth at the event to begin communicating with the community about their future needs for employees and integrating with their neighbors to make the development as Pittsburgh centric as possible. This shows their statements about concern for their neighbors are more than just words.
