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Even top performers may barely be keeping up with cost-of-living increases.

Corporate salary increase budgets this year will be below 3 percent for the first time in two decades, The Conference Board reported today.

The research organization said 2010 "salary structure adjustments" for all categories of employees are "not expected to top 2 percent" this year.

That's below the forecasted inflation rate of 2.6 percent.

Party hearty for the Super Bowl…or for any other well-known national occasion…but be aware that bosses will be a bit suspicious if you call in sick the day after.

A poll of Society for Human Resource Management professionals, released last week, found 8 percent saying they’d had increases in the number of employees calling in sick the day after a major televised event.

Eleven percent said they had more employees showing up late to work on the day after such big events.

The national unemployment rate for the first month of 2010 fell to 9.7 percent, down from 10 percent in December.

At the same time, U.S. employers cut 20,000 jobs in January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning.

That rather confusing result reflects the fact that the numbers come from two separate surveys -- a household survey that's a telephone poll of 60,000 persons, and a larger establishment payroll survey that looks at actual employee numbers.

The Kansas City metro area had an unemployment rate of 8.6 percent in December, and area employers provided 24,800 fewer payroll jobs than they did a year earlier.

The metropolitan jobs report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lags the national report by a month. The national unemployment rate for December, published in early January, was 10 percent.

(The national jobless rate for January will be published Friday.)

About 700 DST Systems employees, likely many of them in Kansas City, can expect to lose work under a company-wide workforce reduction the Kansas City-based company announced this afternoon.

DST has about 10,000 employees in total and historically has employed about 40 percent of them in Kansas City. The most recent report from the company said it had 10,900 employees, including 4,500 in Kansas City at the end of 2008.

There were about 28 percent more jobs posted online for the Kansas City metro area in January 2010 than in January 2009, according to a report released today.

The Conference Board, a national business research organization, found about 26,000 jobs posted on online last month for the metro area, compared with about 20,000 a year ago.

Unfortunately, there were about four times that many job hunters in the metro area, according to estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In depressed job markets, where job hunters vastly outnumber job openings, there are people who try to profit at desperate job hunters’ expense.

There are “headhunters” who charge for access to a “hidden job market.”

There are Web pages that charge searchers to see “top-dollar” job opportunities.

There are scam artists who present job offers that are attempts to steal your identity.

While the overall U.S. economy grew last year, employers held the line on compensation costs for employees.

Among private industry workers, 2009 was, on average, an exercise in running in place financially.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported today that compensation costs for employers increased 1.4 percent last year. That was the smallest published percent change since the data series began in 1975.

Median weekly earnings for the nation's 98.7 full-time wage and salary workers were $748 in the fourth quarter last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That's a 2.7 percent nominal increase over the year, that needs to be weighed against a 1.4 percent rise in the consumer price index over the same time to get a measure of real wage growth.

At a meeting this week of people who convene job transition support groups in the Kansas City, I heard reports of more "landings" than usual in the past two years.

Yes, there are still hundreds of long-term unemployed workers attending the meetings, but there are glimmers of better hiring days ahead. Here are two:

The Society for Human Resource Management says its Labor Market Outlook survey for this quarter found 43 percent of human resource officials having some level of optimism about job growth. That's up sharply from 12 percent in the first quarter of 2009.