Wall Street upbeat as second quarter ends

Investors are looking to keep stocks in positive territory on the last day of the second quarter.
U.S. stock futures are slightly higher Tuesday morning, extending modest gains logged the previous day and following mixed trading in overseas markets.
After a relatively quiet day of trading on Monday, investors are hungry for more signs that the economy is not only improving but growing. Later Tuesday morning, investors will get a reading on consumer confidence.

Google Documents, a great tool!!!

Google documents is a great tool for after hours recruiting. Create an availability list of your current available employees in a spreadsheet in Goggle documents, then share the document with everyone in your branch location. Update your document often to include your newest employees was well. This tool will allow access to your employees away from work when you get that late evening call or weekend work.

U.S. consumer confidence rose in June

Reuters reports
Expectations growing that recession may be coming to an end

U.S. consumer confidence rose in June to the highest since February 2008, as expectations grew that the worst economic recession since the Great Depression may be ending, a survey showed on Friday.The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its final index of confidence for June was at 70.8 from 68.7 in May, equaling February 2008's reading.This was above economists' median expectation for a reading of 69.0, according to a Reuters poll.The index of consumer expectations edged lower, though, to 69.2 in June from 69.4 last month.Since the November 2008 low of 55.3, the sentiment index has gained 15.5 points, recouping about one-third of the loss posted since the peak in January 2007."Such a sizable gain has usually indicated that an end to the economic downturn is on the horizon, as consumers begin to increase their spending on houses, vehicles, and large household durables," the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said in a statement.

Upbeat outlook for economy

Stocks rose Friday, following overseas markets. Investors are reacting to better-than-expected economic data on Thursday that suggested the U.S. economy might be in better shape than some investors had feared.

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Diversified Sourcing Solutions is simply one of the best staffing services available. Sure, Diversified Sourcing Solutions can provide your company with everyday short and long-term temporary employees for assignments. They also can provide your temporary to permanent placements for as well. But did you know that Diversified Sourcing Solutions provides an array of other Human Resources solutions? Take for example Diversified Sourcing Solution’s Direct Hire program. With proven expertise, they can identify, screen, and test candidates for almost every position within any organization. How about Risk Management, did you know that Diversified Sourcing Solutions can test and certify your employees to become OSHA certified forklift operators? Right at your place of business! Diversified Sourcing Solutions can also help prepare your company for an OSHA inspection, and help prevent costly fines and penalties. PEO services (Professional Employer Organizations) is just another service Diversified Sourcing Solutions provides. Needless to say, there are not very many staffing services that provide so many Human Resources solutions like Diversified Sourcing Solutions does. If you would like any additional information email me at cmiller@employtheexperience.com

Wholesale Prices In Check

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Wholesale prices jumped slightly in May, the government said Tuesday, but the increase was less than expected and the 5% annual rate of decline was the sharpest since 1949.
The Producer Price Index, which tracks the changes in selling prices for domestic producers, rose by 0.2% last month. The report is widely watched to monitor inflation.
A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a 0.6% increase.
The jump in wholesale prices follows a 0.3% increase in the index in April. January's 0.8% increase snapped a five-month streak of falling prices.
"There's no story on inflation here, and deflation doesn't seem to be a concern," said Anika Khan, economist at Wachovia.
Inflation and deflation: Year-over-year, wholesale prices fell 5%, the largest decline in 60 years.
"That continues to show that even further back in the pipeline we don't have inflation risk," Khan said.
Inflationary concerns rise in tandem with large increases in the so-called "core PPI," which excludes volatile energy and food costs, Khan said. In May, the core PPI edged up by only 0.1%, matching forecasts.
Conversely, deflation is characterized by "broad-based, continued declines in subsectors, which we haven't seen," Khan said.
A 2.9% increase in energy goods prices offset a 1.6% decline in consumer foods, the report said. That's due in large part to gasoline prices, which rose 13.9% following a 2.6% increase in April.
Prices at the pump have increased for 49 straight days, according to a separate survey for motorist group AAA.
Outlook: In the short term, neither inflation nor deflation should occur, Khan said.

Anthony Balderrama, writer and blogger for Career Builders shares with us 10 worst work habits that everyone should break.

1. Procrastination
A lot of people work best under pressure, or at least they say so. With everyone having a different personality, you can't say a strict schedule works best for all employees. Putting tasks off until the last minute, however, invites plenty of problems, even if you think the final result will be glorious.
When you leave yourself no wiggle room to complete a task, you run the risk of encountering an unexpected obstacle that makes you miss the deadline. Even if the situation is out of your hands, everyone will be left wondering why you didn't plan better and account for last-minute emergencies.

2. Being a sloppy e-mailer
E-mails are second nature to most people these days, and in informal communications they've become a digital Post-it note. We type out a message and send it without proofreading or double-checking the recipients. That's a recipe for disaster.
If you haven't learned your lesson by now, the day will soon come when you accidentally "Reply All" to an e-mail and a slew of unintended readers receive a silly note you intended only your co-worker to read.

3. Confusing informal with disrespectful
In many workplaces, the boss might be the decision maker, but he or she isn't the stern, humorless caricature you saw on TV. Using your supervisor's first name and going for some drinks after work are common in many industries. Still, you are the employee and the boss is the boss -- the one who can fire you and tell you what to do. Don't cross the line by talking to her as if you're talking to one of your direct reports or even your best friend. You need to show some respect for her authority.

4. Taking advantage of leeway
Some companies are strict about the time you clock in and out. Others have guidelines but no hard rules, so you can arrive at 8:35 a.m. and no one cares. If over time you're arriving at 9:10 a.m. and leaving at 4 p.m. (with plenty of breaks in between), your reputation will suffer.
This also goes for dress codes. Business casual is up to interpretation, but ripped jeans and concert tees probably don't fall under your company's accepted definition.

5. Refusing to mingle
Plenty of wisdom lies in the advice not to mix personal and professional lives. However, refusing to take part in any social activity -- such as the office potluck or a happy hour -- will not help your career. You don't need to be the resident party animal, but being personable with your colleagues helps build camaraderie. You get to know other people better and they get to know you as more than the person they pass in the halls.

6. Always running late
This isn't the same as abusing leeway; this is a matter of trust. If you're late to work, to meetings and with projects, your boss and colleagues will associate that trait with you. When it's time for a promotion or to deal with an important client, everyone will think twice before giving you the opportunity. Who wants to trust the person who can't manage his or her time?

7. Being rigid
One of the unfair aspects of the working world is that sometimes it seems you can't win. If you're hired to do a job, most bosses don't want you passing the day by reading your favorite book. The reason: You were hired to do a job, so do it. But if the boss comes to you with a new project that's outside the parameters of your usual duties, it's still yours to do. "You don't pay me to do that" isn't something you want to tell your supervisor.

8. Acting as the resident contrarian
We all love your spirited personality, but try not to be the person in the meeting who always has a better idea and can tell you why everyone else's idea is dumb. Voices of opposition are often missing in many workplaces because too many eager employees want to be "yes" men and women. But too much negativity grates on nerves and makes people dread hearing your voice. Continue to be a critical thinker, but make sure you're doing what's best for the company and not just trying to be the loudest voice in the room.

9. Badmouthing the company
With blogs, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other sites, you have plenty of opportunity to vent your frustration with life. If you're going to complain about how dumb your boss is and how much you hate your job, keep those rants private. The Internet is public domain and comments have a way of finding their way back to all the wrong people. If you wouldn't stand outside your boss's office and tell a co-worker how ready you are to quit, don't express the same thoughts in an open forum.

10. Politicking
Office politics are often unavoidable, and sometimes having a grasp on what's going on can benefit you, but you shouldn't spend more time masterminding office warfare than you do working. Getting caught in the crosshairs of a workplace controversy can be out of your control, but if you're the one instigating the drama, you're earning a bad reputation. You're the person who starts trouble and whom no one trusts. That's the kind of notoriety that follows you from one workplace to another.

Washington - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday improved its forecast for the US economy for the first time since a deep economic crisis struck last year, citing indicators that the worst may be over. The IMF said the world's largest economy will shrink 2.5 per cent this year, revising its April prediction of a 2.8-per-cent contraction for 2009.

Jobless benefit rolls drop

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The number of people on the unemployment insurance rolls fell slightly for the first time in 20 weeks, while the tally of new jobless claims also dipped, the government said Thursday.
The Labor Department report provides a glimmer of good news for job seekers, though both drops were small and the figures remain significantly above the levels associated with a healthy economy.
The department also said U.S. workers were more productive in the first quarter than previously estimated, as rapid layoffs forced companies to make do with fewer employees.

Green jobs growing at twice national average

Associated Press

NEW YORK - The fledgling renewable energy industry has grown steadily over much of the past decade, adding jobs at more than twice the national rate, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released Wednesday.
Solar and wind-power companies, energy-efficient light bulb makers, environmental engineering firms and others expanded their work force by 9.1 percent from 1998 to 2007, the latest year available, according to Pew.
The average job growth in all industries was 3.7 percent during the same period.

The entire energy sector has experienced growth in recent years as well, according to the Bureau of Labor. Bureau data shows coal mining jobs jumped 16 percent from 2003 to 2009. Oil and gas extraction jobs jumped 28 percent.
The Pew study does not include employment data from the past 18 months, a volatile period for the energy industry.
Since the data was collected, the government has said it would pump billions into renewable energy and effiency programs. The banking meltdown made it nearly impossible to raise cash and oil prices have collapsed.
Alternative energy companies have been hit hard by the recession, with a string of bankruptcies in the ethanol industry and layoffs in the wind-power industry.
Lori Grange, Pew’s interim deputy director, said that while green industries will certainly benefit from the influx of billions in stimulus dollars, the report shows that the clean energy sector has proven itself sustainable.
States like California, Texas, Florida, and New York continue to employ the most people in the industry. However, states experiencing the largest growth rates were Idaho, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming, according to the report.
Michigan, which has lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, saw a 10.7 percent increase in clean energy jobs from 1998 to 2007.
That is not to say that clean energy jobs have kept pace with overall job losses.
Pew counted 22,674 clean energy jobs in Michigan in 2007. To put that into perspective, Michigan lost 38,400 jobs in April alone.
Many of the new manufacturing jobs do not pay as well as traditional union jobs, either, yet workers who have made the shift say the industries are moving in different directions.
One cast off from the auto industry is Bob Mamo, 50, who was director of business development for a Dearborn, Mich., auto parts supplier until he was laid off in November. He was in the industry for 20 years.
Last month, he landed a job as vice president of manufacturing for Free Flow Power, a hydropower company based in Gloucester, Mass.
The auto industry “just looked like it was going in the wrong direction,” he said. “Green energy is definitely on the upswing. Green energy was what I was really after.”
Liesl Clark, deputy director for Michigan’s Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth, said the state is doing what it can to help manufacturers shift operations to supply parts for wind turbines, such as gear boxes and drive trains.
For its study, Pew used private jobs data that included information about employers, and Pew researchers spent nearly a year determining which ones could be considered part of the clean energy economy.
“Our numbers are probably conservative,” said Kil Huh, who directed the study. “If we couldn’t identify as part of green energy, it wasn’t part of our count.”
The Pew jobs data was dominated by environmental engineering firms and other pollution cleanup specialists that have been around for years. But the report showed that the fastest growing areas include companies that make hybrid diesel buses, traffic monitoring software, liquid biofuels, and jobs related to solar and wind energy.
“The explosive growth is really in clean energy,” Huh said.

Recession is easing

BREAKING NEWS





WASHINGTON - The economy's sharp downhill slide eased in the late spring and hopes for future business activity improved, suggesting that the worst of the recession has passed.
A Federal Reserve snapshot of economic conditions issued Wednesday found that five of the Fed's 12 regions said that the "downward trend is showing signs of moderating."
In addition, "several" regions said that their expectations of future business activity have improved, although they don't see a "substantial increase" through the end of the year, according to the Fed report. In the last survey, several regions simply noted signs of some stability at low levels.

Altogether, the assessments of businesses on the front lines of the economy appeared to be slightly better than those they provided in the previous report issued in mid-April.
Known as the the Beige Book, the Fed survey is consistent with observations made by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and other central bank officials that the recession, which started in December 2007 and is now the longest since World War II, is loosening its strong hold on the economy.
Many analysts predict the economy is sinking at a pace of between 1 percent to 3 percent in the current quarter. If they are right, that would mark a big moderation from the steep declines seen since last fall.
The economy shrank at a pace of 6.3 percent in the final quarter of last year, the most in a quarter-century, then by 5.7 percent in the first three months of this year. It marked the worst six month performance in 50 years.
The survey's findings will figure into discussions when Bernanke and his colleagues meet next on June 23-24.
Economists have mixed opinions on whether the Fed will take additional action to bolser the economy at that time. Some believe the Fed will move to increase its purchases of government bonds in a bid to drive down rates on mortgages and other consumer debt. The goal: spur Americans to buy more, which would aid the economy.

Private surveys show bright spots in job market

WASHINGTON - Signs of stabilization in the job market are emerging, according to several private surveys, as restaurants, mortgage servicers and health centers step up hiring.
About a quarter of manufacturing companies and more than 40 percent of service-sector employers plan to hire workers in June, the highest totals in six months, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Still, the figures are substantially lower than they were a year ago.
And the Conference Board said last week that online job ads rose by 250,000 in May to 3.37 million, the first increase since October and the largest jump since October 2006

The Labor Department's report Tuesday, known as Job Openings and Labor Turnover, did show some pockets of growth for the first time in months: Openings for lawyers, accountants and other professional business services rose by 30,000 to 458,000.
Restaurants and hotels also advertised about 55,000 more openings in April than in March, the report said. Restaurant operators added nearly 9,000 jobs in May, according to the government's employment report Friday. That's the first time the industry has added workers in 10 months, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association.

"Restaurant operators in general are growing more optimistic about the economy," he said.

Hiring has also ramped up among banks and other lenders. In part, that's because low interest rates have led to a surge of mortgage refinancings.

The same trend is apparent in online job listings, according to Paul Forster, chief executive of Indeed.com, a job-search site that aggregates online want-ads from thousands of sources. Its count of mortgage-related jobs has risen 50 percent since last summer, he said. Job listings related to foreclosures and bankruptcy are also up.
Gautam Godhwani, chief executive of Simply Hired, another job search site, said total online job postings are declining but at a much slower pace than earlier this year. Online want ads fell 3.7 percent in May, he said, compared with 5.9 percent in April and 13.7 percent in February.

In another positive sign, Godhwani said businesses have become more likely in recent months to post their ads across multiple sites, possibly due to larger hiring budgets.
"It indicates that there is greater optimism and greater demand," he said.

On the Road to Recovery

It’s been a little over 100 days since the Recovery Act was signed by the President. We’ve come a long way –- we’ve created or saved over 150,000 jobs, cut taxes for 95 percent of working families and made funds available for over 4,000 transportation projects. But while we’ve made progress, we still have a lot more work to do on this road to recovery. To accelerate our recovery efforts, the Vice President announced the Roadmap to Recovery, ten major projects that will keep more teachers in the classroom, put more cops on our streets, and give more people access to healthcare over the next 100 days. = 8 -->

Watch the video at http://www.whitehouse.gov/recovery/blog/

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You can view your results as soon as they are collected. Watch live graphs and charts, and apply filters to your results
Easily dig down to the individual response level to see the details of particular respondents, or to read the comments of open-ended questions.
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Hiring slowly improving

Employment expectations are at four-year lows for June in both the manufacturing and service sectors, but hiring has slowly improved compared to the past couple of months, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Those two sectors employ more than 90 percent of the nation’s private sector workers.
The Alexandria, Va.-based association’s report is based on a monthly survey of human resources professionals at more than 500 manufacturing and 500 services companies.
Employment expectations for June are down 37.1 percent in manufacturing and down 8.2 percent in the services segment.
In the manufacturing sector, 24.5 percent plan to hire in June, which is the highest percentage of such companies that said they will add jobs since November 2008. In addition, 25.9 percent said they will trim payrolls.
In the services sector, a net total of 24.8 percent of corporations will create jobs in June, with 41.4 percent saying they will hire and 16.6 percent saying they will cut jobs.
That 41.4 percent represents the highest such tally since September 2008 in that sector.
A combination of unemployed people seeking work and less jobs to go around means recruiting difficulty in both sectors in May was way down compared with a year ago.
In the manufacturing sector, a net of 23.8 percent of companies had less difficulty with recruiting last month, and in the service sector, a net of 35.8 percent of companies said the same.

OSHA Gearing up!

In a press release from April 28th, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said "...through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to improve America's infrastructure and put Americans to work, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will receive economic recovery funds it will direct toward enhanced and targeted enforcement; technical assistance, guidance, training and outreach; and construction data collection."Well based on the DOL job openings announcement I received by email today it appears the money is already being spent. The vast majority of jobs listed (click on the link for the listing) are for positions in OSHA. Specialists, investigators, lead inspectors, program assistants, engineers and more.
This is a double-edged sword. On the good side this means good jobs for people interested in the safety field. Some of these pay over $85,000. And it means longevity. And benefits. So if you are interested in a career with the government check it out.
The other edge means that the enhanced enforcement becomes a big possibility. So if safety is a concern for your organization you had better prepare. But OSHA does help. Here is the Field Operations Manual that provides guidance to all investigators. You can wade through all 329 pages to see what you need to do.