We are getting a ton of “doomsday” scenarios thrown at us the last few weeks. Time for a bit of a reality check. The fundamentals of the US economy continue to improve. Temp staffing levelss continue to rise both month over month and year over year. We have seen throughout 2010 how this index and its improvement has led to improvements in the BLS NFP reports.
I would expect this to continue into 2011 (ignore week to week numbers, the variances are too large to get caught up in them). I said durning 2010 that I thought US firms would begin to hire in earnest late Q1 and throughout Q2. I still feel this is the case.
ASA Staffing Index Monthly Report
February 2011Staffing employment in February is 13% higher than in the same month last year, according to the ASA Staffing Index.
The index for February is 90, up one index point from 89 in January, suggesting that U.S. staffing employment has increased 1% over the past month. Staffing employment is typically lowest during the first few months of each year and grows throughout the subsequent months. To view weekly index data, visit http://www.americanstaffing.net/statistics/historical_data.cfm.
The ASA Staffing Index (http://www.americanstaffing.net/statistics/staffing_index.cfm) is reported nine days after each workweek, making it a virtual real-time measure of staffing employment trends. ASA research (http://www.americanstaffing.net/statistics/pdf/Staffing_Jobs_as_Indicators.pdf) shows that staffing employment is a coincident economic indicator and leading employment indicator, especially when the economy is emerging from a recession. Data for the index are gathered by ASA research partner Inavero, a market research firm based in Portland, OR: http://inavero.com/