Bloomberg (04/09/12) Timothy R. Homan; Carlos Torres

Economists from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Deutsche Bank
Securities Inc. believe hiring should pick up from the pace of
120,000 new jobs in March as the economy is now better able to
handle rising fuel costs and the economic downturn in Europe.
They do not expect a repeat of the last two years, which started
off promising but experienced some setbacks when government debt,
energy costs, and natural disasters generated concerns. Bruce
Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan, believes gains in revenue
will surpass a slight jump in wages, giving employers an
incentive to bolster hiring.

Janette Marx, senior vice president at the Melville, NY-based
division of Adecco SA, says clients and customers are growing
more confident. “We’re seeing a lot of people convert
from temporary positions to full-time positions across a lot of
industries. The acceleration really stepped up in the second half
of the first quarter,” she says.

Washington Post (04/06/12) Peter Whoriskey

The housing market collapse left 1.4 million construction workers
without jobs, pushing the unemployment rate in the construction
industry above 17%. However, U.S. Federal Reserve economists
disagree as to whether unemployed construction workers are worse
off than others who lost their jobs during the economic downturn.
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Richard
Crump and Aysegul Sahin, do not believe construction workers are
“experiencing relatively worse labor market outcomes,”
contrary to the opinion of two economists at the Federal Reserve
Bank of Atlanta, Pedro Silos and Lei Fang.

The construction industry is the focus of a debate about how to
handle unemployment, with one side insisting economic shifts have
resulted in a mismatch between the skills possessed by workers
and the skills needed by the economy. This means there are too
many people right now with construction skills who are unprepared
to enter other professions, and stimulating the economy with
monetary policy or government spending will not improve the
situation. This viewpoint is in contrast to those who believe the
economy needs to be stimulated through government policy to
reduce unemployment rates and that following every recession, the
economy and workers make adjustments. These economists believe
that unemployment in the construction industry, for instance,
would decline if more money was spent on infrastructure
projects.