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.

Working the Jobs Reports

Two major batches of job-related data are due out over the next couple of days. If it’s been a while since you visited the employment scene, now’s a good opportunity to ponder more ways to provide informative and useful information to readers concerned about finding or hanging on to a job. These days, that group includes pretty much everyone.

In fact, here’s an idea you might try for a riveting enterprise piece: I’ve noticed lately that here on my solidly middle-class, tree-shaded street, there are a lot fewer cars wheeling out of driveways at 7:30 a.m.

On my block, there’s a former senior VP for an international auto supplier doing a lot of gardening this summer instead. An out-of-work IT professional is looking for piano playing gigs and a laid-off career purchasing manager for a manufacturing firm now spends his days driving his elderly mom to doctor appointments. A truck driver was furloughed in July due to the automotive industry crisis, and a dental-lab tech has been sent home early (without pay) because laid-off patrons simply aren’t getting their teeth fixed as often.

And those are just the ones I’m aware of, on an obscure little lane in middle America. A year or so ago, these workers were enjoying their peak mid-career earning years and believed their prospects were solid and secure. Now they’re dipping into savings to pay for COBRA health insurance, scaling back retirement plans, giving up the lawn service and nervously half-joking about a second career at Home Depot.

Find a street, an apartment house or a condo complex in your city or town and go door to door, charting the jobs and prospects – or lack thereof - among the occupants. If they’re employed, do they expect to stay that way? If they’re not, what are they living on? What’s their Plan B? For the Web, envision an interactive map with a Google-earth aerial view that includes pop-up infographics and video interviews about each household in a microcosm of your community. Your readers will be glued to their screens, especially if you include sidebars about upcoming job fairs, retraining programs, state career-aid centers and the like.

One caveat: Do some fact-checking. Even decent people are self-conscious when talking about personal finances and might be inclined to embellish things in order to save face or appear sympathetic. If someone tells you they were just laid off after 25 years, call human resources to verify. If they claim to be limping along on $300 a week in unemployment, ask to see their paperwork. Bolster the individual anecdotes with statistics that reflect the state of your subjects’ industries and occupations, and interviews with recruiters and major employers. Rigorous reporting will net the grittiest and most compelling detail.

Back to the data, which you can use to put local anecdotes in context:

Tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. the Labor Department releases weekly jobless claims; last week’s report showed an uptick week-over-week although the four-week average slipped. Check out this earlier tipsheet on deciphering the weekly jobless figures and how to put a face on the abstract data with local story angles and state-level charts and graphics.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics posts its monthly Employment Situation report. This is the more comprehensive of the two reports and the one from which the national unemployment rate is derived. The numbers are sliced by all sorts of interesting demographic and industry sectors, so chances are strong you’ll find an angle in there somewhere that reflects your audience. And unlike the weekly jobless claims release, which counts only people eligible for unemployment benefits, this report purports to count the nation’s many marginally employed, underemployed and those ‘discouraged’ workers who are too demoralized to pursue their job hunt.

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.