Unemployment rate drops! -When will hiring start?

[OurMoney1]

People movers will likely pick up by mid summer 2010 provided the american consumer starts spending. There is still alot riding on this bail out, if America doesnt start consuming the products being made than we will slip into the abyss again. Another bail out would be likely if Washington can agree but that still doesnt mean airlines will start hiring.

Expect feeders, regionals, commuters by mid summer. Majors by 1st quarter 2011. And night haulers 3rd quarter 2011. And thats all a big maybe......

 

[crxpilot]

No significant hiring until 2013. Count on it.

 

[pilotyip]

significant?

No significant hiring until 2013. Count on it.

Define significant? Is it three tiems as many jobs as today, is it only hiring at SWA, FedEx and UPS, is it only hiring at real jobs that require a college degree? Is it hiring like 1999-2001? Define significant and then I will agree or disagree with your 2013 prediction.

 

[Rerouted]

Even if there is "significant" hiring, if the jobs pay 18 -25K who cares? Actually, in the Northeast, make it $40K to even pay rent for a studio apartment and have an old clunker to drive to work. I agree with what was stated above - we've got an economic mess on our hands. Inflation has to follow this unreal spending sooner or later. If the airlines pay no more, but the cost of living starts marching upward, starting salary at the regionals will be acceptable only to kids living with mom and dad. That's probably who they'd like to hire anyway. Those of us who need to work for a living will continue to have to find other means to make our living.

 

[pilotyip]

You need to define

Even if there is "significant" hiring, if the jobs pay 18 -25K who cares? Actually, in the Northeast, make it $40K to even pay rent for a studio apartment and have an old clunker to drive to work. I agree with what was stated above - we've got an economic mess on our hands. Inflation has to follow this unreal spending sooner or later. If the airlines pay no more, but the cost of living starts marching upward, starting salary at the regionals will be acceptable only to kids living with mom and dad. That's probably who they'd like to hire anyway. Those of us who need to work for a living will continue to have to find other means to make our living.

Before you define an event, you must establish what the standards for completition. So I ask again what is Significant? If you guys fail to define significant, I will thne stick with my call of 2012. Infact it is starting already.

 

[jhill]

George Bush's chickens have been coming home to roost for awhile alright.
I'm not an economist and no one on here is. I'm guessing a lot of people get their info from cable TV and talk radio. I don't care if you are on the right or left, most of public opinion is as a result of people listening to some pundit that supports their preconceived notions. Unfortunately, many of those people make crap up, it's quite possible Beck is the biggest liar of them all and yet he has a huge audience and best sellers.
As far as Government spending goes, the only thing I know is:
1) It is what kept the current crisis from being worse than it already is according to economists way more qualified to make that call than any cable TV or radio pundit.
2)The reason this economy didn't crash as bad as 1929 is because the mistake we made in 1929 was when the economy retracted, the Government cut back on spending, making matters much worse according to Kenesian economics.
3) What a joke it is when people call Obama a socialist. It may be a very emotional tag to put out there, but our Government policies are hardly socilalist. We are still a great country, we will get through this and prosper and at some point the airlines will be hiring like crazy. Airline hiring has always been a very cyclical deal.

How long have you been working for the DNC? Do you have to blow Howard Dean to keep this gig?

 

[CesnaCaptn]

Does everyone realize that someone who's unemployment runs out, is officially no longer unemployed?

In case you or anyone else is interested in how the government actually calculates the unemployment rate, I've copied and pasted this straight from the BLS site.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Some people think that to get these figures on unemployment, the Government uses the number of persons filing claims for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits under State or Federal Government programs. But some people are still jobless when their benefits run out, and many more are not eligible at all or delay or never apply for benefits. So, quite clearly, UI information cannot be used as a source for complete information on the number of unemployed.

Because unemployment insurance records relate only to persons who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to actually count every unemployed person each month, the Government conducts a monthly sample survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. The CPS has been conducted in the United States every month since 1940, when it began as a Work Projects Administration project. It has been expanded and modified several times since then. For instance, beginning in 1994, the CPS estimates reflect the results of a major redesign of the survey. (For more information on the CPS redesign, see Chapter 1, "Labor Force Data Derived from the Current Population Survey," in the BLS Handbook of Methods.)
There are about 60,000 households in the sample for this survey. This translates into approximately 110,000 individuals, a large sample compared to public opinion surveys which usually cover fewer than 2,000 people. The CPS sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States. In order to select the sample, all of the counties and county-equivalent cities in the country first are grouped into 2,025 geographic areas (sampling units). The Census Bureau then designs and selects a sample consisting of 824 of these geographic areas to represent each State and the District of Columbia. The sample is a State-based design and reflects urban and rural areas, different types of industrial and farming areas, and the major geographic divisions of each State. (For a detailed explanation of CPS sampling methodology, see Chapter 1, of the BLS Handbook of Methods.)
Every month, one-fourth of the households in the sample are changed, so that no household is interviewed more than 4 consecutive months. This practice avoids placing too heavy a burden on the households selected for the sample. After a household is interviewed for 4 consecutive months, it leaves the sample for 8 months, and then is again interviewed for the same 4 calendar months a year later, before leaving the sample for good. This procedure results in approximately 75 percent of the sample remaining the same from month to month and 50 percent from year to year.
Each month, 2,200 highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees interview persons in the 60,000 sample households for information on the labor force activities (jobholding and jobseeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the survey reference week (usually the week that includes the 12th of the month). At the time of the first enumeration of a household, the interviewer prepares a roster of the household members, including their personal characteristics (date of birth, sex, race, Hispanic ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, veteran status, and so on) and their relationships to the person maintaining the household. This information, relating to all household members 15 years of age and over, is entered by the interviewers into laptop computers; at the end of each day's interviewing, the data collected are transmitted to the Census Bureau's central computer in Washington, D.C. (The labor force measures in the CPS pertain to individuals 16 years and over.) In addition, a portion of the sample is interviewed by phone through three central data collection facilities. (Prior to 1994, the interviews were conducted using a paper questionnaire that had to be mailed in by the interviewers each month.)
Each person is classified according to the activities he or she engaged in during the reference week. Then, the total numbers are "weighted," or adjusted to independent population estimates (based on updated decennial census results). The weighting takes into account the age, sex, race, Hispanic ethnicity, and State of residence of the person, so that these characteristics are reflected in the proper proportions in the final estimates.
A sample is not a total count, and the survey may not produce the same results that would be obtained from interviewing the entire population. But the chances are 90 out of 100 that the monthly estimate of unemployment from the sample is within about 290,000 of the figure obtainable from a total census. Since monthly unemployment totals have ranged between about 7 and 11 million in recent years, the possible error resulting from sampling is not large enough to distort the total unemployment picture.
Because these interviews are the basic source of data for total unemployment, information must be factual and correct. Respondents are never asked specifically if they are unemployed, nor are they given an opportunity to decide their own labor force status. Unless they already know how the Government defines unemployment, many of them may not be sure of their actual classification when the interview is completed.
Similarly, interviewers do not decide the respondents' labor force classification. They simply ask the questions in the prescribed way and record the answers. Based on information collected in the survey and definitions programmed into the computer, individuals are then classified as employed, unemployed, or not in the labor force.
All interviews must follow the same procedures to obtain comparable results. Because of the crucial role interviewers have in the household survey, a great amount of time and effort is spent maintaining the quality of their work. Interviewers are given intensive training, including classroom lectures, discussion, practice, observation, home-study materials, and on-the-job training. At least once a year, they attend day-long training and review sessions. Also, at least once a year, they are accompanied by a supervisor during a full day of interviewing to determine how well they carry out their assignments.
A selected number of households are reinterviewed each month to determine whether the information obtained in the first interview was correct. The information gained from these reinterviews is used to improve the entire training program.

 

[Lear70]

Before you define an event, you must establish what the standards for completition. So I ask again what is Significant? If you guys fail to define significant, I will thne stick with my call of 2012. Infact it is starting already.

We're seeing very FEW places hire pilots. Air Wisconsin is interviewing, a few other regionals have talked about it, as has AirTran and even a whisper at Delta. However, you're talking a very small number of pilots to mainly fill attrition that wasn't replaced as ASM's were reduced over the last 2-3 years, with over 4,000 ATP rated pilots with a lot of experience out there in either an "unemployed" status or flying a crap freight job making less than a Waffle House or Home Depot manager. (Yes YIP, if it's not one week on one week off or better and the pilot can't commute, it's a job they take until they have something better to replace it).

What I'm NOT seeing is an increase in every OTHER type of commercial flying hiring that usually accompanies an upswing. Usually, as was pointed out earlier, you see the regionals hiring first (and they all start hiring at almost the exact same time - within a couple months of each other), the freight haulers close behind them (with almost every 2nd-tier hauler hiring simultaneously as their pilots head off to the regionals after being sick to death of on-call night freight), then finally the Majors start hiring towards the END of the cycle, pick up the top of the Regional Pilots and buddy-system lists, then the whole thing comes crashing to a halt just as quickly as it started, and a few years later, as the economy contracts, a few carriers furlough.

What I've also seen is that the hiring/downturn curves are becoming sharper and shorter on the hiring side and longer on the downturn side. I've also seen that our pilot development pipeline (flight schools) are off between 40-80% for Commercial pilot applications, depending on the area you're in.

What this looks to mean is that I believe we're going to have a very weird hiring cycle for the next decade. Spurts of it, here and there, with no real meaningful "high" cycles due to contraction of ASM's at Majors with many of them having pilots on furlough to replace what attrition they have and what small ramp-up we will see in summer travel.

Additionally, by anyone who really looks impartially at our economic situation, this looks to be mostly a "jobless" recession recovery. Meaning that there won't be new jobs to suddenly bounce us straight from a recession into an economic boom as we saw a few times in the last 3 decades. It's going to be slow, protracted, and painful.

Lastly, yes, there will be a price to pay (inflation) for the government spending that's temporarily propped up our economy. The additional problem is that pay rates likely won't increase much as a result of excess labor being available, so those who ARE working are going to have to tighten down during the recovery, much less start spending more on tickets.

I believe YIP is right in that we'll see some better hiring in 2012, but I'd bet money we won't see a real "boom" in aviation hiring like we've seen in cycles past until at least 2018-2020. It's going to take that long to re-employ all the furloughed pilots (quite a few from carriers that went out of business) with most of the hiring to cover attrition from the age 65 retirees headed out the door from the post-Vietnam era that would have been retiring by now. I certainly don't see any airline increasing ASM's by more than single-digit growth, and most are still REDUCING ASM's in actuality.

After that, all bets are off, since we'll have a real shortage of qualified pilots for the regionals to hire with the severe downturn of new pilots in basic Private - Commercial Multi training. However, don't call Kit Darby quite yet... God knows if we'll lose another Legacy or other Major carrier in those intervening 9-10 years, which will put us in yet ANOTHER glut of qualified pilots on the street.

What a mess.