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Employment picture generally healthy, but not for all groups

By Kay Anderson -- Furniture Today, October 20, 2006

High Point — The unemployment rate in 2006 for the first nine months has ranged between 4.6% and 4.8%, generally speaking a healthy job situation.

But not all groups are having an easy time finding employment. For blacks and Hispanics, the jobless rate has been significantly higher all year, reaching 9.2% in September for blacks and 5.4% for Hispanics.

On the other hand, the jobless rate for adult men of all ethnicities fell to 3.8% in September on a seasonally adjusted basis, and for Asians, dropped to less than 3%, not seasonally adjusted.

If hiring plans reported to Manpower Inc. in the latest Manpower Employee Survey hold up, the employment situation should hold at least steady for the fourth quarter.

According to the survey, the strongest job prospects for the rest of this year are in the West and the weakest are in the Midwest.

Employment prospects are up in all 10 sectors covered by the Manpower survey, with the strongest gains predicted in wholesale and retail trade as the holiday selling season looms.

The Manpower Employment Index is based on the results of nearly 14,000 interviews that Manpower conducts with employers in 10 U.S. industry sectors. To arrive at a net employment outlook, researchers take the percentage of employers anticipating an increase in hiring activity in the next quarter and subtract the percentage of employers that expect to see a decrease.

"The economy has been producing about two million payroll jobs per year for a total of 5.7 million additional jobs since August 2003," Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, told members of the National Assn. of Business Economics in a speech in September. "The unemployment rate, which was 5.1% in 2005, is forecast to average 4.7% percent in 2006."

Steady but more subdued employment gains are predicted in the National Assn. for Business Economics' September Outlook, which represents the consensus of a panel of 50 professional forecasters.

The panel, surveyed in August, sees average unemployment rates of 4.7% in 2006 and 4.9% in 2007.

2006 employment rates by groups
Seasonally adjusted rates
	Quarterly averages
	First	Second	July	August	September
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
All workers	4.7	4.7	4.8	4.8	4.6
Adult men	4.1	4.0	4.2	4.1	3.8
Adult women	4.2	4.2	4.2	4.1	4.2
White	4.1	4.1	4.1	4.1	4.0
Black	9.1	9.2	9.5	8.8	9.2
Hispanic	5.2	5.3	5.3	5.3	5.4

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