The board said there were 27,200 ads posted in Sacramento in September, up from 26,500 in August and up strongly from 23,100 in September last year.

Statewide, there were 529,400 ads in September, up nearly 3 percent from 514,800 in August and a substantial improvement from 456,300 in September 2011.

Sacramento remains second nationwide in the number of unemployed per advertised job vacancy, with a 4.09-to-1 ratio. That trailed only Riverside’s 7.59-to-1. The national rate is 2.68-to-1.

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Between January 2012 and February 2012, total wage and salary employment located in the counties of El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, and Yolo increased by 5,400 to total 803,800 jobs.

• Professional and business services reported a steeper than average increase of 2,300 jobs. The majority of the increase occurred in administrative and support and waste services (up 1,700 jobs).
• Government increased by 1,600 jobs. Local government accounted for the majority of the increase (up 900 jobs). State government gained 800 jobs, and federal government lost 100 jobs.
• Leisure and hospitality expanded by 1,200 jobs. Food services and drinking places (up 1,200 jobs) accounted for the increase.
• On the downside, trade, transportation, and utilities reported a seasonal decline of 1,000 jobs. Retail trade (down 700 jobs) and transportation, warehousing, and utilities (down 300 jobs) accounted for the decrease.

Between February 2011 and February 2012, the total number of jobs located in the region decreased by 5,600 or 0.69 percent.

• Leisure and hospitality decreased by 4,500 jobs. Arts, entertainment, and recreation (down 3,200 jobs) and accommodation and food services (down 1,300 jobs) accounted for the loss.
• Government contracted by 4,300 jobs. State government (down 2,600 jobs), local government (down 1,200 jobs), and federal government (down 500 jobs) accounted for the decline.
• Construction shrank by 2,800 jobs.
• On the upside, education and health services increased by 3,900 jobs. Health care and social assistance (up 3,400 jobs) accounted for the majority of the increase.

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“Things look slightly better,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which released its quarterly outlook.

California is expected to suffer a 10.8 percent average jobless rate this year, but that should improve to an average of 9.8 percent next year.

That outlook is brighter than the group’s previous view. In December, the Anderson Forecast predicted a 10.5 percent unemployment rate for 2013.

“We are seeing improvement in the labor markets,” Nickelsburg said.

What’s more, job growth should steadily improve in the coming years, the researchers predicted.

The number of payroll jobs in California increased 1.2 percent last year, according to the Employment Development Department.

The Anderson Forecast said that pattern of job growth should continue, with statewide payroll increases of 1.3 percent this year, 1.9 percent next year and 2.5 percent in 2014, the economists said.

“Things do look like they are going to be a little better in California, given the recent sharp drop in the state’s unemployment rate,” said Jeffrey Michael, director of the Stockton-based Business Forecasting Center at University of the Pacific.

The nationwide job market is also on the upswing. But growth in the United States

still doesn’t look that great, according to a report for the Anderson Forecast that was prepared by senior economist David Shulman.

“We are growing, but curb your enthusiasm,” Shulman said.

The economy added an average of 250,000 jobs in the first two months of this year. That would work out to a rate of 3 million jobs a year. But Shulman said he doesn’t think that kind of growth can be sustained.

Instead, the nation is more likely to add 160,000 to 200,000 jobs a month on average, he said. That would equate to an annual pace of 1.2 million to 2.4 million jobs.

The strong job growth in January and February was boosted by mild weather around the country, Shulman said.

“There was more construction, more outdoor work, people went to restaurants and the mall,” he added.

The rebound in California is being led by industries that are strong in the Bay Area.

“Tech industries, professional, scientific and technical services, health care, computers and electronics — those are all doing very well,” Nickelsburg said.

More recently, improvements have begun to surface in some industries that have lagged. Retail, along with leisure and hospitality, are rebounding, Nickelsburg said.

The Bay Area is likely to remain in the vanguard of the recovery for California, analysts said.

“The Bay Area has definitely been leading the rebound for the last six months or so,” said Michael, the UOP economist. “We think the Bay Area will continue to outpace the rest of the state in job gains.”

During the one-year period that ended in February, job totals in the Bay Area grew 1.9 percent, more than double the pace of statewide job growth of 0.9 percent.

“The rebound started in Silicon Valley and now the improvement is spreading throughout the Bay Area,” Michael said.

The country’s employers added a disappointing 120,000 jobs in March, about half the gains posted in each of the preceding three months. The unemployment rate, which comes from a separate survey of households rather than employers, slipped to 8.2 percent from 8.3 percent, as a lower portion of the population was looking for work.

The slowdown suggests that employers remain cautious about hiring as they digest the impact of rising gas prices and uncertainty about health care and pensions costs.

Politicians seized on the slippage, with the Republican front-runner, Mitt Romney, characterizing the report as “weak and very troubling.” President Barack Obama, for his part, acknowledged the “ups and downs” of the job market.

“It’s clear to every American that there will still be ups and downs along the way, and that we’ve still got a lot to do,” the president said at a White House forum on women and the economy.

Obama accentuated the positive elements of a report that showed persistent weaknesses in the job market. The unemployment rate, he said, “ticked down,” while the United States added 600,000 jobs in the past three months.

For a president turning to campaign footing, the Labor Department’s employment report has become a monthly political barometer — evidence to buttress the White

House’s case that its policies are hastening a recovery or Exhibit A in the Republican charge that Obama has been a failed economic steward.

Friday, Romney seized on the latter argument, declaring in a statement issued by his campaign that “this is a weak and very troubling jobs report that shows the employment market remains stagnant.”

In the past few months, when job creation was stronger, Romney has had to carefully calibrate his response. This time, however, he played up numbers that show the overall labor market is shrinking.

California’s statewide jobless rate was 10.9 percent last month, unchanged from January. The Bay Area’s jobless rate was 8.6 percent in February, according to this newspaper’s analysis of state Employment Development Department figures seasonally adjusted by Beacon Economics.

The South Bay posted a February jobless rate of 8.7 percent, down from 8.9 percent the previous month. Meanwhile, the East Bay’s was unchanged at 9.3 percent, while the San Francisco area’s was at 7.4 percent, worse than the previous month’s 7.3 percent rate, a Beacon estimate shows.

While there have been some indications, like falling unemployment claims, that the job market was finding its footing, anxieties about whether a stronger pace of recovery could be sustained have been building in recent weeks.

This week, global stock markets grew skittish as Spain’s ballooning debt level and weak bond offering raised the specter of a deepening economic slump in Europe. After a strong first quarter, the U.S. stock market has had several days of declines. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has tried to temper expectations and noted in a speech last month that the recent “better jobs numbers seem somewhat out of sync with the overall pace of economic expansion.”

The March pullback eerily repeats a pattern set in the past two years, when job growth appeared to be picking up in the winter, only to slow down in the spring. The monthly snapshot of the job market from the Labor Department can reflect transitory factors, however, and are often revised.

Economists suggested that the trend among employers to wring more work from fewer people continues to be a hallmark of the recession’s aftermath.

“What we are seeing now is an agonizingly slow recovery in the job market,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “I believe what this reflects is this laser focus intensity that business leaders have nowadays to try to be able to increase production with less reliance on labor as a means to do so.”

Private sector companies added 121,000 jobs in March as government shed 1,000 jobs, driven by layoffs in the postal system and at the local level.

Among industries, manufacturing continued its run as the stalwart of job growth, adding 37,000 jobs in March.

But economists cautioned that factories were unlikely to bring back a majority of the 2 million people who lost their jobs during the recession.

Rather, manufacturers are recalibrating.

“In the worst of a downturn like this, they probably kicked too many people out the door,” said Cliff Waldman, senior economist at MAPI/the Manufacturers Alliance. “And now even with modest growth they have to bring people back.”

And despite recent improvements in retail sales, retailers shed nearly 34,000 jobs last month, a sign, some economists said, that the rapid incursion of e-commerce has hurt employment in the sector.

“You simply need fewer workers when you’re selling from a distribution center,” said Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at J.H. Cohn and a deputy assistant secretary for employment and training in the Reagan administration.

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“Background screening companies routinely cut corners to improve their profits and then they wipe their hands of any responsibility for producing an inaccurate or misleading report that can cost a worker his or her job,” says National Consumer Law Center Staff Attorney Persis Yu and co-author of the report. “Federal regulatory agencies and states should rein in the Wild West of the background screening industry by holding companies accountable.”

NCLC’s research reveals that criminal background screening companies’ reports routinely:

Mismatch people (i.e. a person with no criminal background with someone who has a record, which is especially problematic for people with common names); Omit crucial information about a case, (i.e. a person is arrested but then found innocent); Reveal sealed or expunged information (i.e. a juvenile offense); Provide misleading information, (i.e. a single charge listed multiple times); and/or Misclassify offenses (i.e. reporting a misdemeanor as a felony).

Many of these errors can be attributed to common practices by background screening companies, such as:

• Retrieving information through bulk record disseminations and failing to routinely update their databases;
• Failing to verify information obtained through subcontractors and other faulty sources;
• Using unsophisticated matching criteria;
• Failing to use all available information to prevent a false positive match; and
• Lacking understanding about state specific criminal justice procedures.

About 93% of employers conduct criminal background checks on some applicants, while 73% of employers conduct checks on all applicants, according to a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Yet there are no licensing requirements and there is no system for registration for background checking companies. Anyone with a computer and access to records can start a business; the total number of companies is unknown.

The National Association of Professional Background Screeners (the industry trade organization) has a voluntary accreditation program that contains some simple procedures (many of which are legally required) that background checking companies can take to enhance the quality of their information. Unfortunately, few companies actually are willing to commit to even the limited recommendations of their own trade association.

“Working without adequate federal supervision, many commercial background screening companies have produced poor quality reports that, in the most extreme cases, have shut people from their careers,” notes co-author Sharon Dietrich, who is managing attorney in Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s Employment and Public Benefits Units.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The National Consumer Law Center report recommends that federal regulatory agencies and states use their authority to clean up industry-wide problems. For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could issue regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (enacted in 1970 by Congress to protect the privacy of consumers) to ensure greater accuracy of background checks and to require consumer reporting agencies to register so consumers can correct inaccurate and misleading information. The Federal Trade Commission can investigate major commercial background screening companies for common FCRA violations and investigate major, nationwide employers for compliance with the FCRA requirements for users of consumer reports for employment purposes.

State legislatures and courts also have a role. They can require companies that receive bulk data from court databases to promptly delete sealed and expunged criminal records and routinely update their records. States can also audit companies and if not in compliance, states can revoke the companies’ receipt of data.

“Background screening companies generate billions of dollars in revenue for producing sloppy work while consumers are left handcuffed with little recourse to challenge and correct misleading or incorrect personal information,” says National Consumer Law Center attorney Persis Yu. “Where’s the justice in that?”

Since 1969, the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center® (NCLC®) has used its expertise in consumer law and energy policy to work for consumer justice and economic security for low-income and disadvantaged people, including older adults, in the United States. NCLC advances economic fairness through policy analysis and advocacy; consumer law and energy publications; litigation; expert witness services; and training and advice for advocates. NCLC works with nonprofit and legal services organizations, private attorneys, policymakers, and federal and state government and courts across the nation to stop exploitive practices and help financially stressed consumers build and retain wealth.

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