Any Concerns Regarding Unemployment at 10% Nationally by Year End?

[nonesuche]

Anyone else here as concerned as I am about this projection? If you are unaware we have four states already at 10% unemployment including CA, and my state now sits at 9.7%. The majority of economic forecasts clearly state this will spread to a national unemployment rate of 10% by the end of 2009.

What does the US look like with that level of unemployment, how does that impact our recent high school and college grads out looking for work, how does that impact the value of our homes when many more will likely be in foreclosure, how does this impact the small business man?

I don't think Obama wants the forecasts of the ripple effect out there for he has some of the largest corporate offenders on his economic committee either.

This piece is out there on MSN this morning and I can share that I am seeing much of this in the current marketplace. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't worry about losing my job or have countless now unemployed former colleagues or business contacts reaching out asking for my help in finding a new position for them. 99% of those are quality professionals too, not non-performers.

I think this article is dead-on too, it really shines the light on the realities of this.

http://www.good.is/?p=16257&GT1=38001

Synergy-related Sacking: The Lingo of Unemployment

How to can employees in a humane and deceitful manner

By: Mark Peters

Unemployment is a national disease, and I just want you to know that I feel your pain, employers of America.

Hey, anyone can sympathize with out-of-work citizens trying to pay the bills and shelter the family. It takes a truly great humanitarian to bleed for the captains of industry, the bazillionaires and kabillionaires and Scrooge McDucks, the affluent few who have been forced to fire thousands and/or switch their private jet fuel to unleaded. If that’s not a code-orange embarrassment at the private airfield, I don’t know what is!

Because I feel the pain of the Jabba-the-Hut-sized business owners of America, I wish to assist them with one of their most dire needs: how to can employees in a humane and deceitful manner.

Just as labeling your love is a challenge, trimming the payroll can make even the most limber-tongued entrepreneur/supervillain reach for the thesaurus. With apologies to pink slip, discharge, disemploy, dismiss, dispatch, decruitment, reduce redundancies, show the door, give someone their walking papers, make a change in the org chart, and career change opportunity, here’s a handy list of terms for the unkindest cuts of all.

downsizing

History: Predicting the implosion of the auto industry, this word first referred (in the seventies) to making smaller cars without sacrificing interior space. As the frequently-upsized Oxford English Dictionary tells us, the current meaning was first found in 1990: “Communicators were facing tough times on their jobs. Many were getting downsized and outplaced.”
Pros: It’s no longer super-euphemistic; everyone knows what it means.
Cons: Everyone know what it means. For a more effective cloaking of reality, see next term.

rightsizing

History: This dates from at least 1987 and sounds jokey, but it’s no joke that some businesses really use the term: “SET adopts ‘right-sizing’ strategy; asks 60 to leave.”
Pros: Sounds like a good thing, if it referred to pants. In fact, RightSize is also the name of a diet shake.
Cons: Implies that soon-to-be-cut employees are like unsightly love handles on the flabby company frame. And speaking of exercise metaphors…

getting fit

History: Getting fit is usually associated with bulging muscles, toned abs, and legs that go all the way down to the floor. But with the econo-meltdown, some not-so-frank folks at Yahoo have had to let a lot of people go, and when you spread that kind of misery, it needs to be applied with a rounded, childproof, butter knife of an expression, as displayed in a leaked memo: “…as we look ahead and to position us for success in 2009, we’re continuing the work already underway to get fit as an organization: actively looking for ways to make process and structural changes to our business that will allow us to work more efficiently, with more scale.”
Pros: Very creative. Will overheat all but the most powerful decoder rings.
Cons: If you actually said this to an employee’s face, the employee, by law, is justified in applying the Five-point Palm Exploding Heart Technique that got such rave reviews in Kill Bill.

reduction in force, RIF, riff

History: Thanks to Dave Wilton for pointing me in the direction of this term, which is military in origin and easily verbed, as in this recent use: “Slashed budgets and riffed staffs are forcing enterprise users of proprietary software business solutions to rethink the suitability of open source replacement products.”
Pros: Acronyms are awesome. So are guitar riffs and comedic riffs.
Cons: Reduction may be too honest a word choice for today’s jittery-squirrel-like stockholders.

terminate, termination

History: This meaning is as old as 1973, but back in the 1600’s, the word was a synonym for determine. Terminate may never recover from 1984’s The Terminator, which gave it an Arnold Schwarzenegger-y odor that just won’t come out.
Pros: Reminds me of the awesome expression for assassination—“terminate with extreme prejudice.” Hmm. Is that really a pro?
Cons: Reminders of death seldom warm the cockles of employer or employee.

sack

History: The earliest meanings of sack as a verb referred to putting stuff and people in sacks—the latter being a prelude to drowning. In the 1840s, employers started to give the sack to their employees, and by the late 1960’s, the word applied to behind-scrimmage quarterback-clobbering as well.
Pros: The many meanings of sack form a coherent chorus: Loss of life, jobs, and yards go together nicely.
Cons: Scores low on the deceit-o-meter every CEO carries in their utility belt.

synergy-related headcount restructuring

History: Too ridiculous to be true? Must be fake? I made this up? No, no, and no. Though rarely used, because it is insane, Nokia Siemens really coined this expression in a press release.
Pros: Synergy is a magical word makes anything sound golden to businesspeople…
Cons: … and absolutely preposterous to the rest of us.

Sizers and sackers and synergy-producers of American, don’t be limited by my suggestions. You are the haiku poets of America, with job loss and misery replacing cherry blossoms and frogs. Riff away!

(Just keep your mitts off my job, thank you).

[nonesuche]

I won't make any comment on this article except to say I'd walk a country mile to work for a CEO like this....

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/03/12/a_head_with_a_heart/?s_campaign=yahoo

A head with a heart

By Kevin Cullen
Globe Columnist / March 12, 2009

It was the kind of meeting that is taking place in restaurant kitchens, small offices, retail storerooms, and large auditoriums all over this city, all over this state, all over this country.

Paul Levy, the guy who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was standing in Sherman Auditorium the other day, before some of the very people to whom he might soon be sending pink slips.

In the days before the meeting, Levy had been walking around the hospital, noticing little things.

He stood at the nurses' stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food chatted up the patients and their families.

He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

And so Paul Levy had all this bouncing around his brain the other day when he stood in Sherman Auditorium.

He looked out into a sea of people and recognized faces: technicians, secretaries, administrators, therapists, nurses, the people who are the heart and soul of any hospital. People who knew that Beth Israel had hired about a quarter of its 8,000 staff over the last six years and that the chances that they could all keep their jobs and benefits in an economy in freefall ranged between slim and none.

"I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I'd like to get your reaction to it," Levy began. "I'd like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners - the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don't want to put an additional burden on them.

"Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice," he continued. "It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits."

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.

Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn't think he could go on.

When the applause subsided, he did go on, telling the workers at Beth Israel, the people who make a hospital go, that he wanted their ideas.

The lump had barely left his throat when Paul Levy started getting e-mails.

The consensus was that the workers don't want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3 percent raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.

"I'm getting about a hundred messages per hour," Levy said yesterday, shaking his head.

Paul Levy is onto something. People are worried about the next paycheck, because they're only a few paychecks away from not being able to pay the mortgage or the rent.

But a lot of them realize that everybody's in the same boat and that their boat doesn't rise because someone else's sinks.

Paul Levy is trying something revolutionary, radical, maybe even impossible: He is trying to convince the people who work for him that the E in CEO can sometimes stand for empathy.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com

[WhiskeyGirl]

The government hasn't made a commitment to jobs for all Americans.  Why not make a policy of 'iron rice bowl' jobs for Americans?   I don't know how the poorest Americans escape 'poverty'.  The poverty level keeps rising, and more and more Americans are trapped. 

Our poverty class, from what I've seen and read is the envy of the world. 

The bad side of the penny - it's hard to escape to a paying job, or a better paying job.  The chasm to success keeps increasing all the time.  $1 dollar over the set poverty levels and you lose all your benefits.  It becomes harder and harder to make that leap.  Why have faith in education?  The divide between the rich and poor continues. 

The 'rich' move and restructure and eventually pay less.  The middle class pays more and more and hidden taxes.  The poor have less incentive to work.

Bring jobs and working back in vogue, as a core American value.  Hard work should be rewareded, hard work should not be a punishment.

jmho

[nonesuche]

WG - thank you for that is such a strong and valid perspective, indeed hard work is being punished. Who are we as a country if we allow those who do literally back-breaking work to be crushed by the allowances made for the wealthy? Executives that I know for the most part, in corporate america are rewarded for being 'slick', not just to make the buck but if you don't make the buck, make sure you deflect and pass that buck onto the back of someone lower in the ranks. It's so pervaded our society that hardly anyone objects to the widening gap between the poor and the rich but oh........didn't Obama use that as part of his platform for election?

I guess we shouldn't hold our breath on that one 

[oldiebutgoodie]

MORE NEWS ON THE ECONOMY (FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY):

Arizona [East Valley Tribune, 3/10/09, "Stimulus money will boost EV job training"]:
 
About $7 million in federal stimulus money will enable Maricopa Workforce Connections to help hundreds more displaced workers upgrade their skills for future employment. The U.S. Department of Labor this week announced state allotment levels for employment and training programs funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The work force investment system will use the $3.5 billion to help Americans get back to work through the national network of one-stop career centers. "It can be used to help folks who have been laid off through education and training programs," said Peggy Abrahamson, Department of Labor spokeswoman. "Primarily the states do this through the one-stop career centers, and there's well over 3,000 around the country."
 
Kansas [Topeka Capital Journal, 3/12/09, "Clinic wait time may be cut, Shawnee County may get stimulus money"]:
 
Money from the federal stimulus program may reduce the three-month wait time for an appointment at the Shawnee County Health Agency Clinic. Shawnee County commissioners authorized Anne Freeze, health agency director, to speed the process of preparing the application and sending it to Washington.
 
Maryland [Gazette.net, 3/12/09, "Stimulus road workers happy to be back on job" ]
 
Stimulus road workers happy to be back on job… When American Infrastructure won the contract to repave a section of New Hampshire Avenue, Bryan White, 47, of Aberdeen, was one of the employees who got the call to return to work.  "It's wonderful," White said of the project, cited as the first in the nation under the $26.6 billion released by President Barack Obama from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to state and local governments to repair and build roadways and bridges. "It's going to create more jobs. I know I'm happy."
 
Massachusetts [The Boston Globe, 3/12/09, "City to funnel stimulus cash to housing, $33m Roslindale project expected to create 700 jobs"]:
 
The city plans to put its first millions in federal stimulus cash to work as early as next month as part of the redevelopment of the Washington-Beech housing development in Roslindale, Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday. Future phases of the redevelopment, which already have received significant federal funding, will mean a total of 342 new affordable housing units at Washington-Beech and in the surrounding area. Menino said yesterday that he believes the planned April 1 start date of construction on the Washington-Beech project made the city one of the first in the nation to use stimulus dollars aimed at housing. Other stimulus-funded projects slated to begin in 2009 include the installation of more energy-efficient lighting and heating at several housing developments ($5 million); upgrades to bathrooms in several of the housing authority's oldest developments ($10 million); heating and cooling system improvements ($5 million); and security camera installation ($1 million). "Washington-Beech is just the beginning," Menino said.
 
Mississippi [Daily Journal, 3/12/09, "Carmichael remains ardent rail transportation advocate"]:
 
Gil Carmichael was as happy as a kid in a candy store that President Obama put $9.3 billion for high-speed rail transportation and upgrading Amtrak into the $785 billion economic recovery package. Carmichael, otherwise a Meridian businessman and former Republican leader, for 20 years since he served as Federal Railroad Administrator has been preaching a vision of a vastly expanded national system of passenger rail transportation he calls "Interstate II." In the Obama recovery package is $8 billion for some 30,000 miles of inter-city high-speed rail transportation and $1.3 billion for Amtrak whose ridership has risen since gas hit $4. The high-speed rail system would significantly benefit all states, even a rural state like Mississippi, as Carmichael will explain in a moment. He praised Obama's inclusion of the rail system in his package: "President Obama clearly understands this necessary new approach to meeting 21st century transportation needs."
 
Missouri [News-Leader, 3/11/09, "Ozarks snaps up road funds" ]:
 
Missouri will get about $525 million in federal funds for transportation -- a slice of which will be for road projects in the Ozarks. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aims to create jobs and jump start the economy, Kirk Juranas, Missouri Department of Transportation district engineer for District 8, said Tuesday evening at a public meeting. "This is about jobs," he said. "Jobs, jobs, jobs." Stimulus funds invested in Missouri's transportation infrastructure will directly and indirectly support nearly 22,000 jobs statewide, according to MoDOT… "These projects all have to be delivered fast," Juranas said.
 
Ohio [Oxford Press, 3/10/09, "Stimulus fund projects to create, retain 275 jobs locally" ]:
 
More than 275 jobs could be created or retained locally as a result of stimulus funds that should hit the area this summer. The Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council presented its list of projects to potentially receive federal stimulus dollars during a public hearing Monday, March 9. The final list should be approved by the OKI board Thursday, said Brian Cunningham, spokesman for the agency. With an emphasis on "shovel-readiness," the OKI staff also selected projects for their ability at improving commerce or creating jobs, he said.
 
Pennsylvania [The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/12/09, "Education stimulus spending outlined" ]:
 
Under Gov. Rendell's proposal for spending federal education stimulus money, Philadelphia schools would stand to get $361 million in additional funding next school year, and suburban districts would get a total of $88 million in new funding. That money is part of $1.1 billion in stimulus money that Pennsylvania would spend on assorted education programs starting in July, according to a plan released yesterday by the state Department of Education. About a third of that money would go directly to a handful of programs targeted to low-income students and special education. Rendell wants to designate the rest of the money - totaling $728 million - to two broad programs. One would supplement the state's regular education funding, which otherwise could face cuts reflecting the poor state of economy. The other would represent new money that districts could use on a variety of programs, including classroom instruction, school renovations, and technology upgrades. It could also be used to make up for any lost school-tax revenue.
 
Virginia [Virginia Pilot, 3/12/09, "Stimulus adds up for Norfolk, transit group" ]:
 
The city will receive about $20 million from the federal stimulus package, and that's in addition to tens of millions of dollars the school system and Hampton Roads Transit will receive. The City Council received a breakdown Tuesday of funds the city has confirmed it will get, including $9.2 million to rehabilitate public housing and $6 million to improve roads. City Manager Regina V.K. Williams said the city has applied for added funds, including $16 million to improve sewer systems in some of the city's oldest neighborhoods…. "You put it all together, and construction firms will be hiring new people and paying overtime to some of their existing employees," she said.

[nonesuche]

but, but, but the states in greatest need are CA, MI, SC, RI - all in excess of 10% unemployment.

Don't see any of those states on that list. Had the stimulus been proportionate to the needs to drive new jobs, I would have been satisfied.

btw, have you ever tried to move from a private sector career to public sector state/federal career? Nearly impossible to do and the majority of Obama's job growth is for public sector.

The greatest job growth always occurs in small business, medium sized companies, and driving entrepreneurship opportunities that yield high job growth rates anyway.