Weekly Jobless Claims Below 500,000

The number of laid-off workers filing unemployment claims dropped more than was expected last week. The number is now at the lowest it’s been in over a year. There is concern that the improvement is temporary, due to the weak economy continuing to push joblessness rates higher. The Department of Labor says that the number [...]

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Engineering Firm Cuts 502 New York Rail Jobs

French engineering firm Alstom SA plants to cut over five hundred jobs in Hornell, New York, which will leave between two and three hundred workers at its rail assembly plant. The cuts were announced after months of waiting, and will begin on January 18th. As contracts have begun to dry up, employees have been laid [...]

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Michigan Joblessness Rate Climbs to 15.3 Percent

Michigan’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, and has crept up to a staggering 15.3 percent, state officials said Wednesday. Last year, the state’s unemployment rate was just under nine percent. The national average is currently just under ten. Rick Waclawek, the director of the state Bureau of Labor Market Information and Strategic [...]

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Federal Contractors Report 30,000 Jobs

Businesses that received federal grants under the terms of the economic stimulus package have reported more than thirty thousand jobs saved or created over the first few months of the program. The numbers were released on Thursday by a government watchdog group. They comprised the first data regarding the effect of the stimulus. The numbers [...]

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Teachers Benefit From Stimulus Spending

Among the demographics that have benefited from the recent effort save jobs via a $787 billion recovery package, teachers seem to have benefited the most. Billions of dollars were sent to states that were on the brink of ordering heavy layoffs in education, but the jobs of estimated tens of thousands of teachers nationwide have [...]

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Recession Still Causing Job Loss

While many factors of the recession are beginning to look better – the stock market is up, house prices holding, service industries recovering, and so on – employment is still suffering. Job losses are expected to continue at least into the middle of next year, driving the unemployment rate above ten percent from 9.8 last [...]

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