Survey: Main Line Employment Set for Growth Among ‘Professional’ Levels

In the wake of last week’s surprisingly positive national unemployment report from the Labor Department, which stated that the overall jobless rate fell last month to 8.6 percent—its lowest level in two and a half years—there is potentially even better news for Lower Merion Township and the affluent Main Line suburbs, another report suggests.

Nationally, employers expect to increase hiring for professional-level positions in the first quarter, according to a new survey by Robert Half International, a specialized staffing firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The report found that some 10 percent of executives interviewed for the report plan to add full-time staff through the end of March 2012, up three percentage points from the company’s fourth-quarter 2011 forecast.

“In a big picture sense, it’s certainly not the boom years of ’06-’07” for this area, said Lori Hourigan, a regional manager who oversees the King of Prussia office of RHI, told Patch. “But it’s nowhere near 2009, when no one was hiring, and if they were, they were underpaying them and no one was getting bonuses, and no one was getting raises. Those days seem to be over.”

Lower Merion at a relative high

Unemployment in Lower Merion Township hit its highest point since at least 1990 in August of this year, hitting the 6 percent mark, after a previous non-seasonably adjusted high of 5.9 percent for three separate months in 2010 (January, March and June of that year), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (See full chart below.)

By contrast, going back to 1990 (the earliest year available), Lower Merion’s non-seasonably adjusted unemployment rate—on an annual basis—was well below 2 percent from 1993 through 1999. Prior to 2009, when the economy crashed and the township’s jobless number spiked to 5.2 percent for the year, the unemployment rate hit a previous 20-year high in 2002, when it hit 3.6 percent.

The most recent figure available for the township, unemployment during this past September, showed a drop back down to 5.2 percent.

Though these numbers are low for the nation, they are relatively high for the township, and could have something to do with another factor of the otherwise improving national picture: the biggest job gains in the most recent unemployment report were in retail, food service and health care (in that order). For an area that's largely white-collar, that's a mixed blessing at best.

But on a related note, there is perhaps more good news to extrapolate from the RHI survey for the Main Line—rife as it is with lawyers, engineers and financial professionals. The survey indicates that the legal field is expected to see the strongest hiring activity, “with a net 27 percent of lawyers planning to increase staff levels” nationally. And the largest net gains in projected hiring (from the prior quarter) belong to the information technology and finance fields. The advertising and marketing areas stand to gain significantly as well, according to the survery.

Never ‘overly fat’

So despite the positive news, hiring in the western suburbs of Philadelphia is still choppy—“two steps forward, one step back,” as Hourigan described it—and seems to ebb and flow according to the various national and local economic data reports that appear. A few months of steady positive news would do wonders for the confidence of employers, she added.

That’s a trend reflected nationally, too. Though 87 percent of RHI’s respondents said they are “at least somewhat confident in their organizations’ ability to grow in the first quarter,” of the more than 4,000 executives interviewed, many “have concerns about finding qualified candidates” for the jobs they plan to offer. And about two-thirds of them (67 percent) said it’s “at least somewhat challenging to find skilled employees today”—up from 59 percent in the fourth quarter and 42 percent in the third quarter.

“The Greater Philadelphia area never got overly fat in those boom years,” Hourigan said. “We’re not New York or Silicon Valley ... companies here are more conservative to begin with, which is why we were not as greatly affected by the recession as a lot of places.”

Hourigan said that those hiring are being cautious. For one thing, the interview process tends to take longer than ever. And six-figure jobs are “still a little light, because you need some movement to create that other movement, like a chess game.”

In other words, people who don’t need to live paycheck-to-paycheck have stayed in their jobs if they could, and have been content to ride out the recession in place, despite a dearth of bonuses or raises. “But we’re starting to see movement there, where we really didn’t in 2009 or ’10," Hourigan said. "And there’s always a trickle-down effect with that.”

Giving up vs. hunkering down

Tempering Friday’s good news was a pretty significant qualification—that the lower unemployment figures do not account for those who have stopped looking for a job.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that some 5.7 million people, or 43 percent of the unemployed, had been out of work for 27 weeks or more. About 1.1 million people—186,000 more than a year ago—were out of work and therefore not counted as unemployed, since they had given up looking for jobs. (Another 1.5 million people were out of work and had other reasons for not looking, such as school or family responsibilities.)

But this is another instance where looking at the kind of jobs being discussed makes a difference. The above qualification does not undermine the positive numbers quite as much in Philadelphia’s affluent suburbs, Hourigan said. “We don’t find many chronically unemployed people” in this area, she said, referring to those who have run out of state unemployment insurance subsidies after 99 weeks.

Hourigan also acknowledged that RHI does not track two-income households, especially those with small children, where it has become more common for one parent to drop out of the job hunt.

A new report from the Census Bureau, for example, shows that as married women have increasingly moved into the workplace, “fathers have become more available for child care while their wives are working.”

This is another example of pieces on the chessboard moving around, but at the other end of the white-collar spectrum from those seeking to swap one six-figure job for another.

“A recession may force families to adjust their child care arrangements,” said Lynda Laughlin, a family demographer at the Census Bureau. “It can trigger unemployment or changes in work hours, thus increasing the availability of fathers to provide childcare.”

More to the point, she added, it can also reduce the available income that pays for that outside-the-home childcare in the first place.

“People hunker down and do what they have to do,” commented Hourigan. “Rather than change their overall lifestyle, maybe ... they do without all the extras, or the vacation, and have someone stay home” with the kids.

***

Non-seasonably adjusted unemployment rates, Lower Merion Township (1990-Sept. 2011)

Year

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Annual

1990

2.4

2.6

2.6

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.5

2.3

2.5

2.5

2.4

2.3

2.5

1991

2.8

3.1

3.0

2.9

3.3

3.3

3.3

3.0

3.0

3.0

2.8

2.4

3.0

1992

2.5

2.6

2.6

2.4

2.6

2.7

2.7

2.6

2.6

2.1

2.0

1.9

2.5

1993

2.0

1.8

1.7

1.8

2.1

2.1

2.0

1.9

1.8

1.5

1.3

1.3

1.8

1994

1.7

1.5

1.5

1.4

1.4

1.7

1.7

1.6

1.6

1.6

1.4

1.1

1.5

1995

1.3

1.1

1.2

1.4

1.5

1.5

1.6

1.4

1.4

1.2

1.2

1.1

1.3

1996

1.5

1.4

1.4

1.3

1.6

1.6

1.6

1.5

1.6

1.5

1.5

1.3

1.5

1997

1.6

1.6

1.6

1.5

1.7

1.9

1.8

1.7

1.8

1.5

1.4

1.1

1.6

1998

1.6

1.7

1.7

1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

1.6

1.7

1.5

1.4

1.1

1.5

1999

1.4

1.6

1.4

1.3

1.5

1.6

1.5

1.4

1.6

1.4

1.4

1.2

1.4

2000

2.4

2.4

2.2

1.9

2.4

2.5

2.5

2.2

2.3

2.2

2.4

2.0

2.3

2001

2.6

2.9

2.9

2.4

2.9

3.2

3.1

3.1

2.9

3.1

3.2

2.9

2.9

2002

3.8

3.8

3.8

3.4

3.9

3.9

3.7

3.7

3.4

3.4

3.5

3.1

3.6

2003

3.6

3.6

3.5

3.2

3.8

4.1

3.8

3.6

3.4

3.4

3.4

2.9

3.5

2004

3.5

3.5

3.5

3.1

3.5

4.0

3.9

3.6

3.3

3.5

3.4

2.9

3.5

2005

3.2

3.3

3.2

2.7

3.1

3.4

3.3

3.3

3.0

3.0

3.1

2.5

3.1

2006

2.9

3.1

2.9

2.7

3.1

3.2

3.1

3.0

2.7

2.5

2.6

2.3

2.8

2007

2.8

2.5

2.5

2.3

2.7

2.9

2.8

2.8

2.7

2.8

2.7

2.5

2.7

2008

2.9

2.9

3.0

2.7

3.4

3.7

3.7

3.9

3.5

3.5

3.8

3.8

3.4

2009

4.4

4.7

4.9

4.6

5.3

5.6

5.6

5.7

5.4

5.2

5.4

5.1

5.2

2010

5.9

5.7

5.9

5.7

5.8

5.9

5.7

5.6

5.1

5.4

5.2

5.0

5.6

2011

5.0

5.2

5.1

4.7

5.2

5.7

5.8

6.0

5.2(P)

P: Preliminary                                                                       Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics