Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans filing initial applications for unemployment benefits last week fell to the lowest in more than eight months, suggesting companies may have eased the pace of firing. First-time claims during the week that ended Saturday dropped to 382,000 from a revised 405,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said in Washington. The last time claims were lower was the week ended Feb. 8, when the total was 378,000. The four-week moving average also fell to the lowest since February. Union Pacific Corp. is among companies that have started hiring. September was the first time since January that the economy added jobs, indicating the labor market may have started to turn around. Claims would need to run at 375,000 or lower to reach the job growth needed to support faster expansion, said economists including Robert Mellman of J.P. Morgan Securities.
``Everything is just sort of drifting the right way,'' Mellman said before the report. ``We've probably reached the level where there's slow job growth but positive job growth.'' Economists estimated that claims would fall to 395,000 from the originally reported 399,000, based on the median of 45 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. The four-week moving average fell to 393,500 from 405,000 as claims from the first week of September -- which were the highest since July -- dropped out of the calculation. The average hasn't been as low since it was at 389,000 in the week ended Feb. 8. The number of people continuing to collect state unemployment insurance declined by 7,000 to 3.642 million in the week that ended Sept. 27.
Insured Unemployment
The insured unemployment rate, which tends to move with the monthly jobless rate, held at 2.9 percent in the week before last. During that week, 23 states and territories reported an increase in new claims and 29 a decrease. One had no change. The U.S. added 57,000 jobs in September the government reported last week. The increase was the first since January and may be a turning point in the labor market, economists said. ``The increase in payrolls in September was a start, and I hope will be followed by larger gains in future months,'' Federal Reserve Governor Susan Bies said yesterday at the Middle Tennessee State University Annual Economic Conference in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. ``I will be watching conditions in the labor market closely because an expansion that is sustainable in the long run will require solid growth in employment.'' Some companies, seeing consistent increases in demand, have started hiring.
Union Pacific
Union Pacific, parent of the biggest U.S. freight railroad, will ``probably'' hire about 1,000 people for train service in the last half of the year, Chief Executive Office Richard Davidson said yesterday in a radio interview with Bloomberg News. Increases in the amount of products shipped over the company's lines since mid-August is ``one thing that's got us motivated here to increase our hiring for the remainder of this year,'' Davidson said. The company expects ``fairly strong hiring'' into next year as well, he said. At the same time, Great Lakes Chemical Corp., a maker of materials used in fire extinguishers, said yesterday it will fire 400 workers, or 8.7 percent of its workforce, and close plants to cut costs. Ford Motor Co., the world's second-largest automaker, last week said it would cut more than 3,000 jobs in North America by year-end.
The number of technology-related job cuts has fallen more than 50 percent from a year ago, according to a survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. In the first nine months of the year, companies announced plans to eliminate 145,997 positions, compared with 334,650 in the same period last year, according to the report.
Factory Jobs
The number of jobs in the manufacturing industry, where layoffs have been the highest since the past several years, declined by 29,000 in September, the smallest drop in more than a year, the Labor Department said last week. ``We may have turned the corner on employment growth in September,'' Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Robert McTeer said earlier this week in a speech to the Money Marketeers in New York. It was the first public acknowledgement by a Fed official that the labor market may have ended its period of declining jobs. Some economists expect more hiring before year-end and say the recent slowing in the number of firings is a first step in the labor-market turnaround. The average number of weekly claims has fallen to 403,400 since the beginning of July, compared with 419,270 in the first half of the year. //www.bloomberg.com