Study: Few PR managers, lawyers unemployed

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2009/07/06/daily54.html

Baltimore Business Journal

Friday, July 10, 2009, 1:17pm EDT

Some specific categories of workers — including lawyers, budget analysts and public-relations managers — continue to show very low levels of unemployment, according to figures complied by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The U.S. unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in June. In dozens of job categories, however, the figures are well below that, according to survey by professional staffing firm Robert Half International Inc. (NYSE: RHI).

For budget analysts, for example, the unemployment average stands at 1.1 percent. For lawyers, it’s 2.3 percent, the same as for financial compliance officers. For public-relations managers, it’s 0.1 percent.

Joblessness for accountants is 5.3 percent, and it’s 6.3 percent for computer and information systems managers and 5.2 percent for credit analysts, according to the Robert Half survey.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Lawyers?

I've been hearing - for the last six months, at least - of old law school buddies who are being terminated, led into early (unwilling) retirement, with very little lead time. The best deal I heard of was one month to clean things up and leave the firm where he'd been working for almost twenty years.

One of my old friends - a Yale law degree, extensive Supreme Court experience, a brilliant appellate lawyer with the most impressive Washington credentials anyone could ever attain - got word on a Thursday that Friday would be his last day at the firm where he had spent almost his whole professional life. Fifty-four years old, two kids in college, a sturdy, loving marriage, absolutely impeccable professional and personal lives.

He checked into his office very early that next day, Friday, which was to be his last, around 6:30 a.m., according to the video surveillance cameras, and went to his office, the one he had to pack up and move out in one day, and there, sitting in his chair, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Yeah, the job market for lawyers is just ducky .....................

[Berry Cool]

3. Yeah. If lawyers have a relatively low unemployment rate of around 2%, it's only because

their previous unemployment rate was near zero. Even in bad times.

I know it's hard to work up sympathies for lawyers, but remember that if you consider them as individual human beings rather than as part of a hated collective, they're not all bad. There are hard-working, long-serving partners who are being told to get out. There are associates who thought they'd never have to worry about having a job being told to take their law degrees and experience someplace else (despite the fact that the other big firms are laying people off too). There are kids fresh out of law school with a mountain of debt who have recently been hired by a big firm, being told that the big firm doesn't want them to start this September anymore, it wants them to start NEXT September. So what do they do for money in the meantime?

No one is immune to feeling depressed and unwanted when stuff like this happens.

[lindisfarne]

4. Legal Aid is hiring. n/t

[county worker]

2. It really pays to have your skills and education before a big down turn like this.

People who rely on unskilled labor jobs aways take the hit. I wonder if and when we get out of this recession how many people will try to upgrade their skill set?

I heard on NPR that classes at junior colleges are over flowing.