A recent episode of the public radio program, The Brian Lehrer Show, debated the importance of job training, discussed the challenges, and profiled effective strategies.
The broadcast featured the perspective of Sheila Maguire, senior vice president of Program Effectiveness at Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit organization.
In a recent piece on the tax debate underway in Congress, The Washington Post presented a graph showing how different groups of personal taxpayers would fare under each of the two main proposals. As the graph shows, the plans differ significantly in the size of the cuts provided to the richest American taxpayers.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
For the benefit week ending on July 24th, 11,838 North Carolinians filed initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits, and 136,135 individuals applied for state-funded continuing benefits. Compared to the prior week, there were more initial and fewer continuing claims. These figures come from new data released by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Averaging new and continuing claims over a four-week period — a process that helps adjust for seasonal fluctuations and better illustrates trends — shows that an average of 13,822 initial claims were filed over the previous four weeks, along with an average of 142,647 continuing claims. Compared to the previous four-week period, there were fewer initial and continuing claims.
One year ago, the four-week average for initial claims stood at 22,797 and the four-week average of continuing claims equaled 211,247.
While the number of claims has dropped over the past year, so has covered employment. Over the past year, covered employment has fallen from 4 million to 3.8 million.
The graph (right) shows the changes in unemployment insurance claims (as a share of covered employment) in North Carolina since the recession’s start in December 2007.
Both new and continuing claims appear to have peaked for this business cycle, and the four-week averages of new and continuing claims have fallen considerably. Yet continuing claims remain at an elevated level, which suggests that unemployed individuals are finding it difficult to find new positions.
Also, little change has occurred within recent months. Since the end of March, the four-week average of initial claims has ranged consistently between 12,856 and 13,987.
From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the June version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) …
The total number of job openings in June was 2.9 million, while Current Population Survey data for that month shows that the total number of unemployed workers was 14.6 million. This means that the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings was 5.0-to-1, a slight improvement from the revised May ratio of 5.1-to-1. Importantly, this ratio does not measure the number of applicants for each job. There may be throngs of applicants for every job posting, since job seekers apply for multiple jobs. The 5-to-1 ratio means that there is literally only one job opening for every five unemployed workers (that is, for every four out of five unemployed workers there simply are no jobs).
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The ratio is significantly improved from its peak last November of 6.2-to-1, but there remains a severe shortage of jobs. The ratio of unemployed per job opening is still far higher than at the worst point in the last recession, when its maximum was 2.8 unemployed workers per job opening. In 2007, before the recession started, the ratio averaged 1.5-to-1.
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