Business Channel 2006-10-03&06

We need to take a look at the markets. It's three winning days in a row for the Dow Industrials and that means yet another all-time high for the world's most famous stock index. The closing number, as you can see, shows the Big Board at the NYSE, the Dow adding 16 points, closing at 11,866.69. The NASDAQ Composite gained der two-thirds of one percent. Oil prices, meanwhile, crept higher, up 62 cents, closing back above $60 a barrel, this as Saudi Arabia and five other OPEC nations say, they will cut production.

Unionized workers at 16 Goodyear tyre plants in the United States and Canada went on strike today. The strike involves 15,000 members of the United Steelworkers Union. The company and union negotiators failed to agree on a new labor 1 deal. The old contract, it is expired back on July 22nd, and both sides had been operating on a day-to-day extension. But on Monday, the union gave a 72-hour notice saying it will terminate the contract by midday today if a deal wasn't reached. Katherine.

So what exactly is causing this rift 2 between the two sides?

The key issue here is Goodyear's desire to shut down plants in Texas and in Alabama, while the union was determined 3 to avoid plant shutdowns. Despite the strike, Goodyear says it has a contingency 4 plan to keep its plants operating and that production will continue at normal levels.

All right, so we got some workers on strike, others, though, having some trouble finding a job. Tell us about that, Val.

Oh, yes. Eh, a third quarter job market index, it was released by the employment specialist agency - Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And it shows that employers have stalled on making new hires. The time that takes to find a job has increased to more than 4 and a half months. That is 11% longer than last quarter. The survey did have some unexpected findings, Katherine, it showed that workers 50 and older were having a slightly easier time finding a job than much younger job hunters.

Oh, that's very interesting. But are these job seekers having to sacrifice here, at least in the salary department to get these positions?

Well, actually that was another somewhat surprising result to have from the survey. According to Challenger Gray, 92 percent of people who scored a job between July and September managed to get a position that paid the same or better than their previous job. So all in all, some very interesting data here, and we will, of course, get a broader picture at the job market tomorrow morning when the employment numbers for September are released. And by the way, the expectation is that job growth will be pretty weak.