Now that the dust is beginning to settle after the terrible storm of the recession of the past year and a half, there is one thing that is starting to become clearer. The high unemployment rate of the recession wasn't really something that came out of poor employers struggling to stay afloat. It appears that they were waiting for just such an excuse as the recession, to shed a lot of jobs they wanted to lose anyway. Receptionists, ticket agents, assembly line workers - they were waiting to lose these less-than-productive jobs anyway. Now that the recession is officially over, if you are waiting to see the economy gear up to take on these jobs all over again, perhaps you could be in for a bit of disappointment. Jobs that are able to be shipped overseas, or are made superfluous by technology, are probably never coming back.
If it weren't for the recession, these companies would probably have found a way to get rid of them anyway; there would have been buyouts, layoffs and the like. The recession came a little early though, and the companies found a way to get their checklists out a little ahead of time. Corporate drones (if the term isn't offensive), are particularly hard hit. These are workers with specific skills that would not be employable anywhere else but at the positions they were made for. You need the environment of the corporate office to be able to exercise the skills you learn as an administrative coordinator for instance. Your skills at filing, typing, delivering messages, would have nowhere else to go. The corporate structure has seen quite a bit of reshuffling and jobs like these have been lost in the shuffle. The unemployment rate in areas like this are pretty scary.
Travel companies have for quite a while now been moving irreversibly to allowing customers to do their own reservations on the Internet. Printing businesses have probably been retaining printers jobs for a while now out of pity; the business has been moving towards complete automation for years now. Now that the recession has given every company a foolproof excuse for downsizing, they see no reason to take on the endless headaches of managing a large staff again anymore. The entire employment market in the country is being torn down to be rebuilt again. And everyone who is caught in this transition with outdated skills, this just in big trouble now. The unemployment rate is going to remain high until everyone retools with new skills.
It's difficult to know which way to see it; but all of this employee pruning has made this year the most productive for American business ever, in centuries. The less essential jobs have been moved overseas, and America gets as much done with fewer workers. The way they describe the situation, uses the word ultra-efficient. Just think about it: the digital office of today makes it so easy for bosses to handle their own calendars, to quickly type their own letters, and to file an email - all with the touch of a button. A manager doesn't even have to be in his office to get all this done - they all have a Blackberry, you know? If any secretarial or administrative jobs are coming back, they'll probably go to younger people. It is particularly high - half of all workers who were sent home temporarily over this last round job sheddinghave lost their jobs altogether. And try as they might, they aren't finding new jobs for nearly a year at a time. It hasn't been like that since the Great Depression.
The government with its stimulus package has set aside a chunk of its funds to help people retrain with new skills - in clean energy technology. To people who just came off working on an assembly line or working at a travel agent's desk, acquiring new skills for electrical energy, can't be easy. And even when some people take the trouble to gain those skills, they still can't find jobs without any real work experience. It occurs to some people that if they were somehow sent to jail for something, they would probably have all the opportunities they needed to learn new skills, and make something of themselves. At the rate things are going, the unemployment rate doesn't seem set to fall meaningfully anytime soon.