Employees report improved hiring activity

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PRINCETON, N.J., May 1 (UPI) -- Survey firm Gallup said its monthly U.S. job creation index was positive in April, coming in at the high end of an established, long-term trend.

The U.S. Job Creation Index has been relatively unchanged for about a year, Gallup said. In April, 35 percent of workers responding to the survey indicated their employer was hiring, while 16 percent indicated their firm was letting workers go.

The index uses simple subtraction to arrive at an index reading of positive 19 for April.

The index for federal employees provided much of the improvement for the month. In March, 23 percent of federal workers indicated their employer was hiring and that improved to 26 percent in April. The percentage of federal employees indicating their employer was dropping workers dropped from 41 percent in March to 36 percent in April.

The Job Creation Index for federal workers, therefore, rose from minus-18 in March to minus-10 in April.

Gallup said it was "unclear whether the uptick in federal government workers' reports of job cuts in March partly reflected a psychological reaction to the news of the sequestration cuts."

With the sequestration cuts "in effect for some time" federal workers now have a more accurate assessment of their employer's intentions, Gallup surmised.

The monthly Job Creation Index is based on a random sample of 17,269 employed adults that comprised the firm's daily tracking survey, which was conducted April 1-29.

The survey's margin of error was 1 percentage point, Gallup said.