While unemployment rose this month to its highest level since 1983 and 263,000 more Americans are out of work, the Business Intelligence Guru’s dashboard on U.S. Unemployment shows two positive signs.
The signs are located in the industry sector detail of the dashboard, on the bottom right hand side of the page. Â This section of the dashboard reports on a seasonally adjusted, month-to-month index measurement of weekly hours of production. One sector seeing more work this month is manufacturing sub sector of beverage and tobacco products. In fact, the beverage and tobacco products sector has seen back to back increases in this index, which stands at its highest level since January 2009. Here’s the 10 year trend for the beverage and tobacco index 
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The manufacturing sub sector textile product mills index of weekly hours of production has been declining for the last decade and the pace of the decline moved from steady to freefall starting in March 2007 when the index stood at 73.3. From March 2007 to April 2008 the textile product mills index of weekly hours fell from 73.3 down to 58.4. This month’s index value of 60.2 puts the index at its highest level in 6 months. Here’s the 10 year trend for textile product mills
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