After 24 consecutive months of reported establishment survey job losses, Bloomberg columnist Timothy Homan reports that a massive surge in Census Jobs May Jump-Start U.S. Employment Rebound in 2010.

The 2010 census couldn’t have come at a better time for the U.S. economy. The government will hire about 1.2 million temporary workers in the first half of the year to administer the decennial population count, possibly providing a bridge to gains in private employment later in the year.



The surge will probably dwarf any hiring by private employers early in 2010 as companies delay adding staff until they are convinced the economic recovery will be sustained. Money earned by the clipboard-toting workers going door-to-door to verify the government population survey is likely to be spent, giving the economy an extra lift.



“It’s a short-term stimulus program in which the government’s injecting money into the economy through additional paychecks,” said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital Inc. in New York, who projects that 2.5 million more Americans will be working at the of the year. “This will support consumer income during those months.”



The stimulus bill President Barack Obama signed in February and additional funding by Congress provided enough money to hire 1.4 million Americans in total for the census, almost three times as many as in 2000. About 160,000 were already employed last year to do preliminary work.



The Census Bureau anticipates hiring about 181,000 workers from January through March and about 971,000 in the following three months.



The economy may add about 700,000 jobs in May alone, mostly because of the census, said Nigel Gault [chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight]. Even Maki’s more optimistic assessment of the employment outlook means the U.S. may take years to recover the 7.2 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007.



By the end of the year the jobless rate will fall to 9.7 percent, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The unemployment in December held at 10 percent.

appear