Article - What Jobs Market Looks Like After The Recession

[Lindy Asimus]

moneywatch.com / Your Future
The New Job Market: Who Wins and Who Loses?

by Nancy F. Smith

http://moneywatch.bnet.com/retirement-planning/article/the-new-job-...

If history is any guide, unemployment will continue to rise after the recession bottoms out, according to Steve Hipple, an economist with the BLS. The last recession began in March 2001 and ended that November, but the unemployment rate didn’t peak until June 2003.

Women Will Bring Home the Bacon

One key factor shaping the post-crash workforce is the relative ascendance of women. Since May 2007, the number of jobs held by men aged 25 to 64 fell by 4.7 percent a year; for women in the same age group, the loss was 1.7 percent. Women aged 55 to 64 gained jobs while every other group in the prime working years lost jobs. The gap in jobless rates between men and women has been increasing. According to BLS data, the April unemployment rate for men was 10 percent; for women, 7.6 percent. That 2.4 percent gap is an all-time high.

Boomers Will Continue to Hog Jobs

Boomers have always been a hard-working group, clocking the highest participation rates in the workforce and inflating the job numbers of each age cohort they pass through. They are now between the ages of 45 and 63, and they’re still hogging jobs. The participation rate for 55- to 64-year-olds in May 2009 was 65.6 percent, a jump of 1.3 million workers over the year before.

The Stimulus Will Reshape the Labor Force

President Obama promised the $787 billion package would add 3 million to 4 million jobs. Most of the funds are mandated to be spent in the next two years, but the impact in many areas will be much longer term. Here are four areas that will get a relatively quick hit from the package but also have the potential for longer-term job growth.

Generous Wages and Full-time Work Will Seem So 20th Century

The 3.7 million jump in the number of part-time workers, to 9 million, is the hidden bombshell in the unemployment story. These increases are often a bellwether that more layoffs are likely, according to Susan Lambert of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The BLS defines involuntary part-time workers as those who are working less than 35 hours a week because their employer has cut their hours or they can’t find full-time work. Today the national average workweek for hourly workers is 33.2 hours — “the lowest average work hours in 30 years,” says Lambert. “A lot of people who think they have full-time jobs are not getting full-time hours.”


Take Action: Presumably you’re doing everything you can to stay on the job, even if it means cutting back your hours. In the meantime, be prepared to be part of a more “flexible” workforce in the future by coming up with a contingency plan for freelance work, networking like crazy, and drafting multiple resumes that emphasize different skill sets

Read the full article by Nancy F Smith here:
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/retirement-planning/article/the-new-job-...