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.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Why wholesale prices matter

Ever wonder what KFC is forking out for “processed young chickens” these days, or how much a paper maker pays for a pound of wood pulp? Me neither.

But wholesale prices do affect the costs of consumer goods, not to mention corporate earnings – or lack thereof - and hence jobs, the stock market and other tangible aspects of our fiscal well-being.

For the fundamentals on the monthly Producer Price Index, which will be released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, check out its comprehensive Web site and tutorial. Like the CPI discussed in a previous tipsheet, the PPI measures the cost of goods and services – in this case, raw or semi-finished materials sold to businesses.

For your corporate coverage, talk to executives about how their financial strategies fluctuate with the inflation rate. Many airlines, for example, have been recording profits or losses based more on the outcome of their fuel-price hedging rather than on the fares we pay for our munchkin-sized coach seats. Other industries stock up on or speculate in the raw goods that make up their products; see if major local employers will they’ll share economic forecasts and the reasoning behind them.

Housing data mania next week

Just a heads up that, as usual, the last two weeks of the month teem with housing data that can help you layer anecdotal stories with statistics. Among the releases coming up:

Aug. 17: National Association of Homebuilders housing market index
Aug. 18: Commerce Dept. housing starts, building permits
Aug. 19: Mortgage Bankers Association applications
Aug. 21: National Association of Realtors existing home sales
Aug. 25: S&P Case/Shiller home price index
Aug. 26: Commerce Dept. new home sales

This Reynolds Center centerpiece by Stephanie Riel offers invaluable hints for covering today’s residential real estate market. And here’s a past tipsheet with related advice.

Bored with the same-old, same-old? Try writing from a non-consumer point of view. It must be pretty grim trying to earn a living as a Realtor these days -- talk to some about their livelihood, fallback plans and whether they’re moonlighting to keep the cash coming in. Imagine the irony of finding a real estate agent who’s in foreclosure herself, or a mortgage broker who can’t make his own house payment. People in those lines of work were all but beating off business with a stick a few short years ago, but when you’re in commissioned sales the downturns really sting.

Also feeling the pain: Homeowners’ associations. Strapped consumers are withholding condo maintenance fees, leaving association boards hamstrung when it comes to paying vendors and repair firms. That starts a downward spiral of declining amenities and sub-par maintenance which doesn’t exactly help move real estate in a stagnant market.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

An Inflation Intro

If you tune out when you hear the term “measure of inflation,” let alone the even more gripping “CPI,” try this: cost of living.

That’s the gist of what’s reflected by an important routine report due out Friday: how much we’re spending for fuel, food, shelter, coffins, cough drops and other must-haves. Compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index measures how prices for common goods and services fluctuate. The CPI for July is due out at 8:30 a.m. on Friday.

It’s a pretty broad survey: BLS workers collect about 80,000 prices each month – on items ranging from electronics to aspirin to flank steak – from some 23,000 retail outlets. Fees on services like water and sewerage also are compiled, as are average rental rates. If you happen to live in a city where the data are collected, another fun story is to get permission to go along with a BLS worker as he or she gathers info at local stores.

We’re in a period of low inflation now, because (in simplest terms) competition for the few consumers still employed and spending keeps prices down. The most volatile components of the CPI tend to be fuel and food, which are affected by seasonal conditions, weather, etc. – which probably accounted for June’s slight inflation spike, because gasoline prices at the pump tend to peak in spring.

If all of this still is too abstract for you, consider: The CPI is used to determine COLA (cost-of-living) raises for millions of Social Security recipients, people working under union contracts, federal and military retirees. Food stamp recipients, children in school lunch programs and others – about 80 million people all told, the BLS says – have their benefits and/or wages tied to the rate of inflation.

That’s a pretty large chunk of your readership, and good fodder for personal finance, consumer and labor stories. The CPI release is summarized, of course, but the 100-page plus full reports really get into minute detail if you dig hard enough –right down to the price of movie theater tickets, dental services, lettuce and tomatoes, you name it. That translates into lots of conversation starters with retailers, restaurant owners, hair stylists, funeral directors and others who sell to the general public – a wealth of story ideas. And for more localizing assistance, periodic reports are issued for major metro areas and about 27 local areas.

The CPI Web site is rife with explanatory publications, downloadable historical data and other tools. It even offers an online tutorial for using the spreadsheets.

Another handy bookmark for your investing and finance coverage: the inflation calculator that shows how the purchasing power of the dollar has changed over the years.

Yikes! It takes $7.05 now to stretch as far as $1 did when I was born! Please, don’t do the math.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.