Tagged: employment

President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (or JOBS) Act into law Thursday, legislation meant to make it easier for entrepreneurs to get investor financing that helps them add workers. Does that mean it will be harder for Republicans to frame Obama as anti-jobs?

"Well, if it works, it will make it harder," said Craig Shirley, a longtime conservative political strategist and writer who runs a Washington, D.C.-area public-affairs firm.

The monthly employment report Friday could help answer a key question about the economy: Will the recently strong job growth slow once employers finish replacing the people they fired during the depths of the recession?

The number of people filing first-time claims for unemployment insurance stayed around a four-year low last week, the Employment and Training Administration just reported.

It says there were 357,000 such applications, down 6,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 363,000.

Claims have been running at the lowest rate since March and April 2008 for several weeks now.

Jobs at U.S. businesses increased by 209,000 in March, according to a report released Wednesday by the payroll processing firm ADP. That's in line with expectations for the monthly jobs report due out Friday.

Analysts expect Friday's official employment report from the Labor Department to show that employers added 215,000 in March and that the unemployment rate remained at 8.3 percent, according to Bloomberg News.

On the plus side, the ADP National Employment Report issued this morning estimates there were 209,000 jobs added to private employers' payrolls in March. And ADP's data often are something of a predictor for what the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have to say when it issues its monthly numbers. Those March figures are due on Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET.

It used to be when you applied for a job, employers checked your references and reviewed your experience and called you in if they liked what they found.

By Dan Verbeck

KANSAS CITY, MO. – Kansas City Mayor Sly James has called for more higher paying jobs for the city. Today he got the pledge of them. Burns & McDonnell engineers and architects will add a thousand jobs, 500 of them locally, between now and 2013.

The new jobs will be added to current work force of three thousand at the employee owned firm.

Kansas City, Mo. – The Kansas City region is 40th worst in one aspect of the top hundred job markets over the last decade. A New York study of the last ten years shows the local market dropped 23 thousand factory jobs.

As a yardstick, the top hundred markets lost nearly 3 and a half million manufacturing jobs over the last ten years.

The most severe loss was Los Angeles, twelve times worse than Kansas City region.