May 13, 2010

Recession eliminated some jobs for good

• Post a comment |
• E-mail |
• Print
• • Share:
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Cynthia Norton, 52, was laid off as an administrative assistant two years ago. (Lori Moffett / The New York Times)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back.

For the past two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — such as file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who have become displaced by technological advances and international trade.

The eventual phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through less painful means such as attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs. But because of the Great Recession, winter came early.

The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more experienced workers such as Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative assistant in Jacksonville.

"I know I'm good at this," Norton said. "So how the hell did I end up here?"

Administrative work has always been Norton's "calling," she said, ever since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16. In the ensuing decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at RAND Corporation, she once escorted Henry Kissinger around the building.

But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one seems to need her well-honed office know-how.

She is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year.

There also have been outsize job losses in other occupational categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing-machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

This "creative destruction" in the job market can benefit the economy.

Pruning relatively less-efficient employees such as clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes U.S. businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest in more than 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.

But a huge group of people is being left out of the party.

Millions of workers who have been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve, economists said. The occupations they worked in and the skills they possess are never coming back in style. And the demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers — especially older and less mobile ones — are able to retrain and gain those skills.

There is no easy way to help the people left behind. The usual unemployment measures — jobless benefits and food stamps — can serve as temporary palliatives, but they cannot make workers' skills relevant again.

Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. She is reluctant to believe that her three decades of experience and her typing talents, up to 120 words a minute, are obsolete. She looks for other explanations.

Employers, she thinks, fear she will be disloyal and jump ship for a higher-paying job as soon as one comes along.

Sometimes she blames the bad economy in Jacksonville. Sometimes she sees age discrimination. Sometimes she thinks the problem is that she has not been able to afford a haircut in a while.

The problem cannot be that the occupation she has devoted her life to has been largely computerized, she said.

"You can't replace the human thought process," she said. "I can anticipate people's needs. Usually, I give them what they want before they even know they need it. There will never be a machine that can do that."

That is true, up to a point: Human judgment counts for something. That means some of the filing jobs, just like some of the manufacturing jobs, that were cut during the recession will return. But a lot of them probably will not.

Offices throughout the country have found that life without a secretary or filing clerk is manageable.

After all, the office environment is more automated and digitized than ever. Bosses can handle their own calendars, travel arrangements and files through their own computers and increasingly ubiquitous BlackBerrys. In many offices, voice-mail systems and doorbells — not receptionists — greet callers and visitors.

Even when orders pick up, many of the newly de-clerked and un-secretaried may not recall laid-off assistants. Any assistants they do hire will probably be younger people with different skills.

Economists have seen this type of structural change, which happens over the long term but is accelerated by a downturn, many times before.

"This always happens in recessions," said John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "Employers see them as an opportunity to clean house and then get ready for the next big move in the labor market. Or in the product market as well."

Economists such as Erica Groshen at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have argued that bigger structural job losses help explain why the last two economic recoveries were jobless, that is, why job expansion lagged far behind overall growth.

There is reason to think restructuring may take a bigger toll this time around. The percentage of unemployed workers who were permanently let go — and so will not be recalled by their former employers — has hovered at a record high of more than 50 percent for several months.

Additionally, the unemployment numbers show a notable split in the labor pool, with most unemployed workers finding jobs after a relatively short time, but a sizable chunk of the labor force unable to find new work even after months or years.

This group — consisting of generally older workers — has pulled up the average length of time that a current worker has been unemployed to a record high of 33 weeks as of April. The percentage of unemployed people who have been looking for jobs for more than six months is at 45.9 percent, the highest in at least six decades.

The question is what kind of policies can help workers like Norton who are falling further behind in the economic recovery and are at risk of falling out of the middle class.

Just as there is a structural decline in some industries, others enjoy structural growth, the "creative" part of "creative destruction." The key is to prepare workers left behind for the growing industry.

"You can bring the jobs back for some of these people, but they won't be in the same place," said Thomas Anton Kochan, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Obama administration has challenged the idea that structural unemployment is a big problem, with Christina Romer, the Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman, instead emphasizing that stronger economic growth is what's needed.

The administration nonetheless allocated dollars for retraining in the 2009 stimulus package and other legislation, largely for clean technology jobs.

• Post a comment |
• E-mail |
• Print
• • Share:
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Read more
Resumes and Job Hunt, market trends, older workers

0 Comments

Leave a comment

* required field

Your name: *

E-mail address: (Will not be displayed)

Your comment: *

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.