Labor Day look ahead
Labor Day is a week away, and with jobs – or the lack thereof – as the topic of the year, you’ve barely time to plan and execute a compelling labor package for next weekend.
The fates – and the feds – are cooperating, with the monthly spate of employment reports due out later this week. They include:
• Tuesday: The ADP Employment Report. Produced by the nationwide payroll processor Automatic Data Processing Inc., which claims to pay one out of every six workers in the country, the report is based on ADP’s inside view of the payroll situation among its 500,000 clients. Sign up here for free e-mail releases.
The ADP report is of interest because of its scope and because it distinguishes between the manufacturing and service sectors, and provides a breakdown based on size of business by number of employees.
• Wednesday: U.S. Department of Labor’s productivity report - includes wage and hours-worked data.
• Thursday: U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly initial jobless claims report.
• Friday: The big one: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment situation report. For a review of the data compiled in this monthly roundup, check out my previous tipsheets on the job reports.
Another helpful report just issued: the American Staffing Association’s second-quarter survey, which shows that temporary employment continued to stabilize throughout spring and early summer. Since some analysts believe temporary and contract hiring picks up before the permanent job market does, it’s a handy benchmark to understand.
But those are layering tools; you don’t want to petrify your audience with bare statistics. Some ideas for compelling packages (which also lend themselves to video and animated graphics, as well as print-and-save infoboxes for readers) include:
• Employment forecast Q&A with eight or 12 of your area’s major employers. Don’t forget colleges and universities, health systems, state and local government and nonprofits as well as corporate and small business employers. This makes for a great infographic or other alternative storytelling technique.
• A recap of union membership in your region; highlight gains, losses and trends but also talk with officials and labor relations experts about new paradigms in union-employer cooperation.
• Select a neighborhood, an apartment building, a street and canvass it, mapping out the employment situation in each household compared to a year ago.
• Take the contrarian tack and find success stories. Some people are thriving despite the recession, snaring good jobs at great salaries. Locate them and share their tips.
• Retraining. What public programs are in the works, what are private employers and economic development agencies planning, what courses of study (like nursing) are overbooked, what are mid-career, displaced workers doing to find a new niche? Readers love career makeover features and they’re an inspiring flip side to a dismal jobs scene.
• Track your local workforce. Collect data on the average salaries of local residents in different professions. Feature a person from each occupation and list key statistics about their area of employment.
