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Good news for workers despite a slowing economy

Even though economists have predicted a rise in the unemployment rate as US economic growth is slowing to its lowest rate in the last 3 years, unemployment continues to fall, a report of the latest figures on the job market shows. In October alone, 92,000 jobs have been added to the job market, 43,000 coming from professional and business services, 34,000 from governmental jobs and an additional 28,000 jobs from the education and health sections. Although jobs in the manufacturing industry, construction industry and retail continued to fall, the gains in the other sectors more than managed to offset the cuts.

And the figures are even getting better: As the number of jobs is growing, pay is rising further as well. Contrary to any worries about the low growth rate of only 1.6 percent per year, workers are pocketing higher hourly wages, reaching a healthy $16.91 on average. And if workers would still wish to leave their jobs, figures say it would only take them 16,5 weeks to find a new position, meaning that the in-between-jobs period is a whole week shorter compared with the 17.5 weeks reported in September.

To sum it up in the words of Mark Twain: The reports of the American economies death were greatly exaggerated, and with economists estimating that growth will improve even more in the last quarter of 2006, American workers can expect more positive news to come their way.