Hiring Freeze Thawing and Wall Street Bonuses

It's a mega link week here at Astron's World of HR blog.

First, from The Journal of Commerce, an interesting article about the hiring freeze starting thaw (H/T Wendy). The article does point, out, however that the road to recovery is just beginning and overall the U.S. job market is pretty flat (with unemployment hovering at 9%-10%). (Picture also from this article).

Next, The Wall Street Journal came out with the numbers yesterday that Wall Street bonuses were up 17% to $20.3 billion in 2009. Now, while it's not surprising that bonuses are up after last year's bonus-busting recession and the tight regulation on Wall Street bonuses, it is still disconcerting to much of Main Street that their tax dollars went to Wall Street for this. The interactive graph that accompanies the article is a good view to show how crazy the bonuses have gotten on Wall Street. You have to figure that many of these bonuses were "making up" for last year. But while most of America is dealing with unemployment, hearing that the average bonus was $124,850 and the average compensation was $340,000 has to be upsetting to many.

Tomorrow we'll get more into the job losses that we talked about as well as looking at which states tax you the most.