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.

Earning, Saving & Spending

Personal income and spending reports are due out at 8:30 a.m. Monday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis – the same folks who brought us Friday’s advance GDP report, which showed that the nation’s economy still was contracting in the second quarter of 2009, but at a slower pace.

The personal income and outlay release uses aggregated numbers for the entire country, so it’s not a great source of nitty-gritty salary detail. Read the May 2009 edition, on the Web site now, for a look at the format and data that will be updated Tuesday with June results.

While very macro, it’s still a decent springboard for doing a grassroots story about household earning and savings trends. (The BEA report assumes that the different between income and outlay equals individual savings, so that figure is part of the monthly report.)

People never, and I mean never, get tired of reading about wages – their own and other workers. And this summer, story angles about household income abound. Aside from the obvious jobless-related approach, many employed workers are taking a pay cut as companies and governments adopt the practice of using unpaid furloughs to cut costs. Check into how widespread this practice is and what the ripple effects are in your area.

It’s not all bad news. Remember that many employees are seeing a few extra stimulus dollars in their checks – how are they spending them? Paying down debt, saving or splurging? You can ask workers themselves, keeping in mind that the real frugalities are home washing out used Ziploc bags and not spending in the public venues like malls and restaurants where you usually find ‘real people’ for your stories. Try to catch people in money-neutral locations – parks, the library, etc., to get a balanced sampling.

Also talk with local banks and credit unions about trends they are seeing. Check with payroll managers – are more workers hustling to retire 401(k) loans or having savings automatically debited right from their checks? Giant payroll processors like ADP and PayChex offers some tidbits in their media centers; it’s worth a call to them or smaller regional providers to see if they can comment on payroll trends.

We also just had a federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 per hour, effective July 24. (Keep in mind that some states’ higher minimums supersede the federal rate; here’s a list from the Department of Labor.) Minimum and living wages are controversial topics, especially among small business owners, so there’s another angle for you.

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.