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By AP Business Writers Christopher S. Rugaber And Michael Liedtke, Ap Business
Writers Sun Sep 5, 1:54 pm ET
Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized
skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a
choice: Take a job with low pay or none at all.
Job creation will likely remain weak for months or even years. But once
employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly
into two categories of roughly equal numbers:
Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and
software engineers.
Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, like home health care aides and store
clerks.
And those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer
moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.
That's the sobering message American workers face as they celebrate Labor Day
at a time of high unemployment, scant hiring and a widespread loss of job
security. Not until 2014 or later is the nation expected to have regained all,
or nearly all, the 8.4 million jobs lost to the recession. Millions of lost
jobs in real estate, for example, aren't likely to be restored this decade, if
ever.
On Friday, the government said the August unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6
percent. Not enough jobs were created to absorb the growing number of people
seeking work. The unemployment rate has exceeded 9 percent for 16 months, the
longest such stretch in nearly 30 years.
The crisis poses a threat to President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress,
whose hold on the House and Senate appears to be at increasing risk because of
voter discontent.
Even when the job market picks up, many people will be left behind. The threat
stems, in part, from the economy's continuing shift from one driven by
manufacturing to one fueled by service industries.
Pay for future service-sector jobs will tend to vary from very high to very
low. At the same time, the number of middle-income service-sector jobs will
shrink, according to government projections. Any job that can be automated or
outsourced overseas is likely to continue to decline.
The service sector's growth could also magnify the nation's income inequality,
with more people either affluent or financially squeezed. The nation isn't
educating enough people for the higher-skilled service-sector jobs of the
future, economists warn.
"There will be jobs," says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. "The big
question is what they are going to pay, and what kind of lives they will allow
people to lead? This will be a big issue for how broad a middle class we are
going to have."
On one point there's broad agreement: Of 8 million-plus jobs lost to the
recession in fields like manufacturing, real estate and financial services
many, perhaps most, aren't coming back.
In their place will be jobs in health care, information technology and
statistical analysis. Some of the new positions will require complex skills or
higher education. Others won't but they won't pay very much, either.
"Our occupational structure is really becoming bifurcated," says Richard
Florida, a professor at University of Toronto. "We're becoming more of a
divided nation by the work we do."
By 2018, the government forecasts a net total of 15.3 million new jobs. If that
proves true, unemployment would drop far closer to a historical norm of 5
percent.
Nearly all the new jobs will be in the service sector, the Labor Department
says. The nation's 78 million baby boomers will need more health care services
as they age, for example. Demand for medical jobs will rise. And innovations in
high technology and alternative energy are likely to spur growth in occupations
that don't yet exist.
Hiring can't come fast enough for the 14.9 million unemployed Americans.
Counting part-time employees who would prefer full-time jobs, plus out-of-work
people who have stopped looking for jobs, the number of "underemployed" is 26.2
million.
Manufacturing has shed 2 million jobs since the recession began. Construction
has lost 1.9 million, financial services 651,000.
But the biggest factor has been the bust in real estate. The vanished jobs
range from construction workers and furniture makers to loan officers,
appraisers and material suppliers. Moody's Analytics estimates the total number
of housing-related jobs lost at 2.4 million. When you include commercial real
estate, the number is far higher.
One of them is Martha Escobar, who last month lost her $13.50-an-hour job
cleaning an office tower owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Century City, Calif.
She was one of 16 janitors, mostly single mothers, who lost jobs as part of the
real estate crunch that's squeezed landlords.
Some of them traveled to New York on Thursday to try to pressure JPMorgan to
get its cleaning contractor to take them back, given that the bank earned $8.1
billion during the first half of this year.
"I don't know what I am going to do if I can't get my job back," Escobar, 41,
said.
JPMorgan Chase spokesman Gary Kishner said the bank has no say over the
layoffs, which he said are handled by the building's cleaning contractor.
On top of real estate-related job losses, manufacturing is likely to keep
shedding jobs, sending lower-skilled work overseas. Millions who worked in
those fields will need to find jobs in higher-skilled or lower-paying
occupations.
"The big fear is the country is simply not preparing workers for the kind of
skills that the country is going to need," says Gautam Godhwani, CEO of
SimplyHired.com, which tracks job listings.
Sectors likely to grow fastest, according to economists and government
projections, are:
HEALTH CARE
The sector is expected to be the leading job generator, adding 4 million by
2018, according to Labor Department data. An aging population requires more
doctors and nurses, physical therapists, home health aides and pharmacists.
Many of these jobs will pay well. Physical therapists averaged about $76,000
last year, according to the department's data. Others pay far less. Home health
care aides earned an average of just $21,600.
Home health care and personal care aides are expected to add about 900,000 jobs
by 2018 50 percent more than in 2008.
Jennifer Gamboa of Body Dynamics Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based physical therapy
firm, says the drive to reduce health care costs should benefit her profession,
which can treat pain less expensively than surgery. Gamboa plans to add two
employees in the next year.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Technology could be an economic elixir as computers
and online networks expand ways to automate services, distribute media and
communicate.
Companies will need people to build and secure those networks. That should
boost the number of programmers, network administrators and security
specialists by 45 percent to 2.1 million by 2018, the government forecasts.
Most of these jobs will provide above-average pay.
Technology pay averaged $84,400 in 2008 nearly double the average
private-sector pay of $45,400, according to an analysis of the most recent
full-year data by the TechAmerica Foundation, a research group.
NEW INDUSTRIES: Deepak Advani, an IBM executive, has a title he says didn't
exist five years ago: "Vice president of predictive analytics."
Companies and government agencies have amassed data on behavior ranging from
shopping habits to criminal activity. Predictive analytics is the art of
determining what to do with that data. How should workers' time be deployed?
How best to target customers? Such jobs could grow 20 percent by 2018, the
government predicts.
Still, economists say more will be needed to boost job growth. The answer may
be some technological breakthrough akin to the personal computer or the
Internet.
"Most big booms come from a particular sector that moves the rest of the
economy," said Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist.
Technology spurred job growth after the 1982 and 1991 recessions. The PC became
revolutionary in the early 1980s. Internet use exploded after the Mosaic Web
browser was introduced in 1994. Housing eventually lifted employment after the
2001 dot-com bust.
"There's a lack of clarity on what the next big thing is going to be this
time," said David Card, an economics professor at the University of California.
Until there is, many people will have to lower expectations and living
standards as they enter fields with less pay and less job stability, said Dan
Finnigan, CEO of online employment service Jobvite.
"People who are unemployed have to embrace this future that they are going to
have many jobs," he said. "We will always be working on the next gig."