U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Source: The New York Times

Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

“There’s too much uncertainty out there,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “There’s not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/economy/27jobs.html?_r=1

[Psephos]

1. Maybe they can get jobs as agriculturists to harvest the bumper crop of green shoots. n/t

[Mari333]

2. by all means, dont regulate wall street or put restrictions on companies who outsource jobs

we wouldnt want to stop the slow slide into hell.

[Deja Q]

5. President Obama has tried that; Steve Brainbutt Ballmer whined in return,

about how taxing foreign profits would make American labor more expensive... or some similarly schizophrenic comment; Ballmer is a total incompetent; the amount of Microsoft products over the last few years show he's doing something wrong.

[Mari333]

9. Obama gets whined at

and they all tepidly back down to big Corporations. not much in the Cujones Dept it seems.

[rwheeler31]

3. Business is republican they want the recovery to fail.

[Deja Q]

4. Then why has the President supported any number of private industry initiatives?

* health insurance
* saying that his plans would not be government-based but be private industry-based

If the recovery fails, then let's hope it takes down everybody. There is no way that those who engineered this "economy" should get a free ride. Rush Pimplebutt should be stuck with the rest of everyone too. Especially when his job is whining into a microphone for a few hours while real people do far more, for far less.

[TheWatcher]

6. How can a Recovery that does not exist fail in the first place?

[fasttense]

7. There is no recovery.

The uber wealthy elite merely were given their gambling bets back, out of the US treasury. Now the uber wealthy are back to betting on the stock market and other such imaginary products.

But nothing has changed in this economy to warrant calling it a recovery. The bets being made are still just as ridiculous. No controls have been put into place to prevent the uber wealthy from risking it all again.

We are still a service economy, exchanging our dirty laundry to each other for pennies, while China builds everything and India develops our technology.

No wonder there are no jobs. There is no recovery.

[No Elephants]

8. Record ratio? LOL. Sounds more like AP or WAPO than the NYT. Then again, the NYT hasn't sounded

like the NYT in a while.

[Le Taz Hot]

10. There is no such thing

as a jobless recovery. Period.

[lonestarnot]

11. So pug econ/slave labor is working out very well then. woohoo.

:puke: