(NECN: Peter Howe, North Reading, Mass.) - The national unemployment rate dropped for a fourth month in a row in December, easing to 8.5 percent amid signs the once-dead jobs machine may finally be sputtering back to some kind of momentum, data reported by the Labor Department Friday showed.
While it’s always cautioned by experts not to make too much of any one month’s figure, the new data show the U.S. added 1.6 million jobs last year, up from 940,000 in 2010 – that, after over 5 million jobs were lost in 2009. As of today, there are still 6 million fewer jobs than there were in America in 2007. The 2012 projection is for 2.1 million jobs to be created, in line with longstanding projections by economists it could take until 2014 or 2015 for the nation to make back all the jobs in lost in the Great Recession and 2008 global financial meltdown.
One leading local example of job growth was Kiva Systems of North Reading, Mass., a maker of robots for warehouse-operations automation that accounted for nearly 1 of every 10,000 jobs created in the whole country last year. With e-commerce booming, and the economy gathering some strength as consumers ease their debt burden and bolster their spending, Kiva’s been a jobs machine, adding nearly 140 new employees in 2011 – 80 percent growth – to reach about 270 now. CEO Mick Mountz expects to continue adding roughly 10 more employees every month this coming year.
“The way the overall economy impacts Kiva is as retail sales get back on track, the way they are, we'll continue to see a surge in orders,’’ Mountz said in an interview Friday. “Our pipeline this year is twice the size that it was the same time last year.’’
Kiva creates all kinds of new jobs, from skilled assembly technicians who put together the orange sleds that move bins around warehouses to bring items to human workers filling orders, to service technicians, software, hardware, and “firmware” engineers, sales people, and PhD’s who design the mathematical algorithms that keep the robots moving around giant warehouses without crashing into each other.
“For every job at Kiva, there may be two or three jobs downstream at an electronic circuit board manufacturer, a cable assembly, high-tech precision machine shop” or elsewhere, Mountz said.
Multiply this scene by a little over 10,000, and you come up with the 1.6 million jobs the once-moribund economy created, jobs that beget the hope of more jobs as more Americans work and spend and put each other back to work. While Republicans are quick to note that unemployment is a full percentage point higher than when Mr. Obama took office, and has only fallen by 0.6 percent this year (with much of that attributable to people giving up looking for work and no longer being counted in the labor force) the president said the December data show “we're making progress. We're moving in the right direction.’’
Montz shares that overall confidence, with his chief worry that political leaders in Washington or Europe may derail the acceleration growth – and chances for continued job creation – that he now sees. “You get some headwinds when people are frozen due to uncertainty around the typical Washington gridlock or the European debt crisis, and when people are watching and waiting, they're not making capital allocation and capital purchase decisions,’’ Mountz said – and that could translate to a slower recovery for jobs than is widely expected and hoped for this year.
With videographer John J. Hammann
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