Friday, January 29, 2010

Temporary Workers -- less worse

I know I know, I'm a bit late in producing this but I've been busy the last few weeks and the usual charts and graphs data feed has fallen to the wayside a bit.

Employment data came out a while ago and the temporary employment subsection showed some improvement in the famous 'second derivative' department. 

Unlike some other people who look at seasonally adjusted data I prefer to look at the non seasonally adjusted series, noise and all. 

December was higher than November, which is unusual.  It could be later hiring for the Christmas rush or the census hiring hitting.  As such the yoy% change was a bit higher than I expected.

 I have added a new line to the graph 'min max average'.  This line is constructed by averaging the max point over the last 14 months and  the minimum data point over the last 14 months.  I use 14 months because the peak and valley for temporary employment can each sometimes vary by a month.  Generally this min max average and the %yoy change confirm each others movements but I thought looking at the data a slightly different way would be interesting.  The min max average continues to drop.

Census hiring is supposed to peak during the summer months and thus hopefully not screw up this data series too much.  Right now it is showing a 'less worse' situation but still NO growth. 

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