Unemployment rate inches up; few jobs created

 

Frank Pettinato, president of Corporate Call Center Inc. in Blue Bell, with Jo Ann Walborn (left), and Patricia Ward, who were recently hired. The company is taking on employees for jobs that could end in December.

 

The nation’s unemployment rate inched up to 9.6 percent in August while companies added only 67,000 jobs, the Labor Department said this morning in a further sign that the recovery remains weak.The jobless rate was 9.5 percent in both June and July, down from 9.7 percent in May. 

Most economists believe that the nation’s businesses must create 120,000 to 150,000 jobs a month simply to accommodate the natural growth of the labor force due to increases in population and immigration.

Although payrolls have increased by 640,000 jobs since January, it would take years of sustained job growth, at 300,000 to 400,000 jobs a month, to begin to recapture the 8.3 million lost since the start of the recession, in December 2007.

The 67,000 new jobs added last month is down from July’s upwardly revised total of 107,000.

A recent survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University underscores the devastating impact of the nation’s prolonged unemployment.Nearly 3 in 4 Americans have been directly affected by the downturn. Of them, 14 percent lost a full or part-time job and 12 percent more saw an immediate family member lose a job. And 30 percent more had a member of their extended family lose work, while an additional 17 percent knew a close friend who was laid off. 

“After suffering through the worst economic disaster most have ever experienced, American workers have diminished expectations about America’s economic future,” said Carl Van Horn, one of the authors of the study and a Rutgers public policy professor.

Even though some believe that Americans would rather collect benefits than work, most don’t hold that view, according to the survey. “With so many families being directly affected, we find Americans have great sympathy and empathy for the plight of the unemployed,” said Van Horn’s coauthor and fellow professor, Cliff Zukin.

Patricia Ward, an unemployed office manager who found work last month as a call center operator, can count herself among those who contributed to last month’s limited job growth.

“There aren’t enough jobs for the people who need them,” she said.

Ward, of Abington Township, is part of a wave of hundreds of people hired by Corporate Call Center Inc. in Blue Bell. The company is benefiting from new government regulations on how insurers must handle sales of Medicare insurance plans.

Working for a major health insurer, Corporate Call Center, through various staffing agencies, is bringing on 700 people to answer phones in Blue Bell during Medicare’s open enrollment in the fourth quarter.

“We hired a teacher and assigned our entire internal training staff” to train Ward and the others for an insurance-selling license, said company president Frank Pettinato. Those who passed the test were reimbursed for their training.

Pettinato said he expects that most of the jobs will end in December, but at least the employees have a license they can use elsewhere.

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