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Archive for April, 2011

It is not unusual for the American Heritage Credit Union in Philadelphia to get 500 resumes for a job advertisement, reports CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason.
But business is growing, the company is taking: tellers, managers and assistant vice-president.

“We potentially could bring in 38 new positions by the end of the year,” said Flora Caranac with American Heritage.

Economist Ellen Zentner said when you base it off the last three months of data; it looks like the economy is getting some momentum on job growth.

“We’ve had the unemployment rate drop a full percentage point very quickly over just four months and that’s nearly unprecedented,” Zentner said.

In February, employment increased in 35 states. The biggest overall growth coming in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Illinois.

But more than 6 million Americans have been unemployed now for six months or more, like Marianne Gannon, a former sales manager with Mastercard. She’s joined a job search group in Westchester County, New York.

Gannon, who has been out of work for 15 months, thinks there’s a bias against people who have been out of work for a long time.

“I applied one night to a particular company on their website,” Gannon said. “And two and a half minutes later I got an email saying ‘Thank you very much. We’ve reviewed your application and resume and we do not feel it is a fit.’”

On job web sites we found repeated postings for sales and management positions that required applicants to be “currently employed.” CBS contacted four firms for an explanation but none replied.

“Even friends or neighbors or whatever around here – they’re like, ‘you’re still out of work?’ It’s like what don’t you understand? The job market stinks,” Gannon said.

The new study, UCLA and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the researchers found evidence of a trend towards the unemployed, according to a report that is often marked, even if they are voluntarily leaving a position.

Craig Alexander, senior vice president and chief economist at TD Bank Financial Group, recently spoke with members of the business community and local politicians in the framework of the 6th edition of the Economic breakfast.

By Lindsey Cole/The Oshawa Express

Flooding. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Political instability. A recession.

Put all of these ingredients together and you have a recipe for a global economy that is facing some significant challenges.

But, believe it or not, the world is beginning to rally, with Canada fairing incredibly well in the mix, says Craig Alexander, senior vice president and chief economist for the TD Bank Financial Group.

He spoke to a group of local members of the business community as well as City staff and councilors at the 6^th Annual Economic Outlook Breakfast, put on by the City of Oshawa.

During his speech he highlighted several areas of improvement and the challenges that are facing the world, North America and the local economy.

He says it’s a tangled web and Canada’s success depends largely on the rest of the world.

“It was a severe recession,” he says of the 2009 economic downturn. “People didn’t know how bad the recession was going to be. People didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel and if they did they thought it was a train.”

But, he says, overall countries are rebounding well and though a natural disaster can be seen as a setback, the tsunami in Japan will not completely decimate the country.

In North America imports will be affected for a short time when it comes to automobiles and technology but overall, things will rebound.

“The rebuilding will actually stimulate economic growth,” Alexander says of Japan. “The economic conditions are improving (on the whole). It’s a very positive outlook. Having said that, it’s a very risk filled environment. There are some very big challenges out there.”

Those challenges include inflation, the cost of food, oil prices and countries facing large deficits.

When it comes to food prices, nature is again to blame.

“Food prices have soared. There just isn’t that much food in the food we buy. An awful lot of it is the marketing, the packaging,” he says, adding prices soared six to eight per cent year over year. “The story is mother nature.”

But when it comes to oil prices, political unrest in the Middle East is the cause and it is cause for concern. Alexander says that is driving oil costs up and the worry is that the unrest will spread to large oil companies in large countries like Saudi Arabia.

“It’s a low probability that we’re going to have an oil shock,” he says, adding it’s something they are keeping an eye on. “If things cool down in the Middle East then you will see oil prices go down.”

Closer to home, the United States is beginning to rally, despite the housing crisis. This, in turn, is benefiting Canada.

“It (the Canada) just chugged along. It’s now recovered all the ground it lost. The U.S. is still in a hole, it’s still got a long way to go but there’s no question that it is improving,” he explains.

“Before Americans were spending like drunken sailors. Consumers have been going without for about two years.”
He says two million jobs were created in 2011 in the U.S., but the jobs lost during the recession amounted to 8.7 million. It shows a slow but steady growth rate, he adds.

When it comes to Canada and the local economy, Alexander says the nation is doing well.

“There was nothing fundamentally wrong with Canada. We were hit with a massive external shock,” he says. “Canada was chugging along nicely when it was sideswiped.”

He says locally Oshawa struggled on the manufacturing side of things, but as the country began to rebound so did Oshawa as car sales ramped up and jobs were created.

However, he adds that while Canada has managed to get most of the jobs back numerically, they went to different areas.

“The jobs haven’t been created in the places that lost them.”

It has moved to service jobs and for Durham that has meant huge improvements.

“The GTA is very competitive. The GTA is very robust. The region as a whole is very strong,” he says. “When you get in the Durham Region it gets a little more diversified.”

He says the GTA unemployment rate is 8.3 and Oshawa is 8.9, so Oshawa is still higher, but Oshawa’s plan is in the right direction, focusing on skilled labour, competitive taxes, retraining and building infrastructure.

“There are still a lot of people out there that need our support,” he says.

“The economy is fundamentally changing. It’s becoming a knowledge-based economy.”

A study by the World Bank published reports Thursday that the online gaming industry has become a company of 3 billion U.S. dollars offered wages to migrant workers in Asia to play all day, raise money virtual and sold to wealthy clients in the Western world for real money.

The report also highlights a new industry in which companies seeking to increase the popularity of its brands to pay low-skilled workers abroad to become his followers to Facebook or Twitter followers.

The study “Knowledge Map of the virtual economy,” World Bank is the first look in depth the impact of online gaming and social media in the developing world. The report was prepared by infoDev, an organization financed by donors to the bank. Lehdonvirta Vili, co-author, said that the bank should not pay the money in the industry because he said the dealmaking violates some of the terms of game publishers and service is cheating.

Known as “gold farming,” the game-playing profession took off in the early 2000s with games such as World of Warcraft and has become a complex industry.

Low-educated laborers in Asia spend hours each day advancing through levels of an online game, picking up gold, swords and gems that enhance a player’s status. Then gaming studios, which employ the players, sell those virtual goods to online retailers. Finally, the retailers sell those items to more than 120 million players worldwide, many of them in North America and Europe, who are unwilling to play the games all day to gather the items on their own.

The bank’s report indicates that online gaming has a positive impact in Asia because 70 percent of the industry’s revenue remains in the gaming countries, with most of that money going to the gaming studios. Compared with the $70 billion coffee market — in which only a small fraction of the revenue remains in the bean-growing countries — gaming has a “much better development impact,” the report concludes.

The report also includes a survey of 26 players and studio managers that offers a rough, yet rare demographic look at their lives: Most of the players work out of studios in China, in Beijing or Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. They earn an average wage of $2.70 an hour, one dollar more than Beijing’s minimum wage for part-time factory work.

“The larger point is that online gaming is often viewed as exploitation. Certainly it’s not a dream career, but the players’ earning is not at sweatshop levels,” Lehdonvirta said.

The gaming studios keep about two-thirds of the industry’s $3 billion in revenue. “Previous studies presumed that the players sold the goods, but that’s not true,” Lehdonvirta said. “If you’re a rural online game player in China, you have no way of setting up a Web site and developing a customer database, and maintaining customer relations.”

The report also focused on a trend in which companies pay low-skilled workers in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines to “like” their Facebook fan pages or become a follower of that company on Twitter. The practice inflates a brand’s popularity.

Twitter regularly suspends accounts created only to follow others. Sean Garrett, a company spokesman, wrote in an e-mail: “We’ve seen numerous instances wherein the accounts that are bought are later suspended. . . leaving the company with few followers and no recourse.”

Facebook spokesman declined to comment on. Site rules allow companies to offer coupons, for example, people, if “as” a page of ads across Facebook.