The unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent. That’s the first time the nation has gained, rather than lost, in jobs since late 2007, with the exception of November 2009, which many economists saw as a fluke.

Reversing the unrelenting jobs decline has been a central goal of the Obama administration, and it has been politically crucial for Democrats to demonstrate progress on the jobs front ahead of the midterm elections in November.

The news will not have an immediate effect on the stock market, where the Dow has been surging toward the psychologically important 11,000 marker this week because Wall Street is closed today for Good Friday.

The employment number was not high enough to beat expectations of many economists who were looking for a gain of 200,000 or more.

Many economists say that about 150,000 of the new jobs can be explained away by the combination of a bounce-back effect from the February snowstorms, as snowed in workers got back to their job sites in March and by massive temporary hiring by the U.S. Census of as many as 50,000 canvassers.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR POLITICO: Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35325.html#ixzz0jxGzqGUQ

Jobs up, good news for President Obama – Eamon Javers – POLITICO.com.

“We’ll see how that goes,” laughs Melissa Gregory, director of financial aid at Montgomery College in suburban Maryland. More than 22,000 students at her two-year college rely on government-backed loans. Gregory isn’t sure the Education Department can handle the jump in student loan applications, with private lenders out of the picture beginning July 1.

“Can they handle the service component? Calls from students, explaining things to students — that will be a real challenge for the Department of Education,” she says, “and it’s one they say they’re ready to handle.”

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR NPR.

Can Education Dept. Handle Student Loans Solo? : NPR.

In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, Geithner read a joint statement — which he prepared with Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — warning that the nation’s unemployment rate “is likely to remain elevated for an extended period. The forecast projects that in the fourth quarter of 2011, the unemployment rate will be 8.9%, and that by the fourth quarter of 2012, it will be 7.9%.”

Geithner called the current unemployment rate of 9.7% “unacceptable by any metric.” He testified that it usually takes the creation of more than 100,000 jobs per month to bring the unemployment rate down; the administration foresees job creation averaging 100,000 for the rest of 2010 — but doesn’t expect it to substantially exceed that. In fact, Geithner said, the jobless rate might even rise slightly over the next few months, as unemployed workers attempt to return to the labor force.

Geithner Warns Unemployment Will Stay High in 2010 – DailyFinance.

Including that so-called jobs bill.

Leo Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who the event’s moderator (and HuffPost blogger) Steve Clemons identified as a “former hard-driving Republican CEO”, mocked the bill’s emphasis on tax breaks.

“I have never hired a man or a woman based on a tax credit,” Hindery said.

Employers hire when they are certain they will have a growing market for their products — and they don’t have that certainty now, Hindery explained.

As for the bill’s emphasis on incentivizing small and medium-sized businesses, Hindery said: “I can’t fix Dayton, Ohio” that way. “We have to have a large-business orientation,” he said. “You’ve got to go after this with big ideas and transformational ideas.”

“We have to come up with a non-belligerent equivalent of the kind of economic shock produced by World War II,” said Huff Post blogger Robert Kuttner, who is editor of the American Prospect and author of the upcoming book: “A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future”.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST:

Job-Creation Advocates Say Obama Just Doesn’t Get It.

The bill, passed by a 62-36 vote, is the latest job creation effort to go before lawmakers, though it contains virtually no new initiatives to boost employment. Its price tag has wavered between $140 billion and $150 billion, which is partially offset. Its next stop is the House, where a quick passage is anything but assured.

Lawmakers have come under pressure from both the White House and unemployed Americans to do more to spur hiring. But after many speeches, officials have enacted little to help the nearly 15 million looking for work.

The latest efforts — which include a $15 billion job creation initiative that the Senate will take up next — don’t sit well with members from either side of the aisle. Some say that more must be done to boost employment. Others, particularly Congressional Republicans, have voiced concerns about adding to the deficit.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR CNN:

Senate passes $140 billion bill extending jobless claims – Mar. 10, 2010.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com.

“It’s definitely on the rise,” says Rob Wilson, president of Employco Group, a Chicago-area staffing firm.

Temporary jobs jumped by 48,000 in February to 2 million and are up 284,000 since September, the government said Friday. That’s a good sign: Employers typically hire interim workers before beefing up permanent staff.

Unlike in previous economic recoveries, temporary spots so far have been slow to segue to more full-time positions. While layoffs have slowed substantially, economists say businesses are hesitating to hire permanent employees until the recovery is firm. Unemployment remains near 10%.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR USA TODAY:

More temp workers are becoming permanent – USATODAY.com.

The Labor Department said Thursday that initial claims for unemployment insurance fell 29,000 to a seasonally adjusted 469,000. That nearly matches estimates of 470,000.

Still, improvement in the job market is likely to be slow, as companies remain reluctant to hire. Last week’s drop only partly reverses a sharp rise in claims in the previous two weeks.

Elsewhere:

• The number of buyers who agreed to buy previously occupied homes fell sharply in January, a sign that demand for housing sank this winter, although some say that is due to bad weather.

• Factory orders posted the biggest increase in four months in January, but demand was led by a surge in orders for commercial aircraft, a volatile category. Aircraft orders surged 118.6%; excluding transportation, orders were up a much more modest 0.1%.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK  FOR USA TODAY: Jobless claims drop, but economy still shows mixed results – USATODAY.com.

On Friday, Obama’s jobs agenda stalled on both ends of the Capitol. In the House, leaders delayed a vote until next week on a Senate plan to extend tax breaks to employers who hire new workers. Liberals called it weak medicine for a 9.7 percent jobless rate, and conservatives said that it would worsen a deficit projected to approach $1.6 trillion this year.

In the Senate, Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) blocked a vote on a House-passed bill that would have extended emergency unemployment benefits past Sunday, arguing that lawmakers should come up with a plan to pay for it. As lawmakers left town for the weekend, more than a million people, by one estimate, were in danger of losing federal aid by the end of March.

Leaders in both chambers hope to return to the issue next week, and aides expressed confidence that a jobs bill in some form would soon be approved. But the intense squabbling over even modest initiatives cast doubt on Democrats’ ability to deliver on Obama’s request for another big dose of tax cuts and spending, which many economists say are needed to push the recovery into high gear.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: Workers wait on promise of jobs as Obama agenda stalls on Hill – washingtonpost.com.

Is your industry on the decline? The federal government projects that a number of industries will lose jobs from 2008 to 2018.

“You can’t sit around and wait for news to come out about what’s going to happen to your industry,” said Alexandra Levit, author of “New Job, New You.” “You have to be proactive about this.”

Disappearing Jobs

Here’s a list of the top 10 industries expected to lose the most jobs by 2018 — and what to do if you’re working in one of them:

1. Department stores: Projected to lose 10.2 percent of the 1.56 million jobs they had in 2008.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO YAHOO! JOBS: 10 Job Sectors in Decline- Yahoo! HotJobs.