Word: joblessness
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Welcome to the workplace of the jobless recovery, where keeping your position means that your In box swells, your pay and benefits shrink, and bathroom amenities don't magically appear. In an office haunted by the ghosts of laid-off employees, those workers who dodged the hatchet aren't necessarily the lucky ones. They must excel at their old jobs to avoid still looming staff cuts and must also juggle extra, unfamiliar duties...
...parents and I were born in the Azores. Like many other immigrants from those islands, we were unable to speak English, jobless and badly educated. My mother, in fact, had never attended school back in our native village of Freguesia. Even her Portuguese vocabulary was somewhat poor. To say, therefore, that she would have difficulty in America learning a new language would not be exaggeration...
...come to this. White-collar workers are joining the jobless ranks in record numbers, tossed aside by the same companies that not long ago lavished them with signing bonuses and free lattes. Although the Labor Department announced last week that overall unemployment fell slightly to 5.6% in September, the number of white-collar workers who are jobless has doubled from two years ago. Professionals, managers and technical and administrative workers now make up 43% of the unemployed, according to the government. "Of course, other workers are hard hit too," says Jeffrey Wenger, an economist at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute...
...most alarming thing about this job crunch is that, once squeezed out of the ranks of the employed, many of the jobless can't seem to elbow back in. The number of Americans unemployed for six or more months hit 1.6 million last month, up 93% from a year ago. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were created during many months in the '90s, but the job market shrunk by 43,000 jobs in September. Professionals and other elite workers--who tend to be older, better educated and highly trained--find themselves fighting for a shrinking pool of high-paying jobs...
Going solo intrigues many corporate refugees. According to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, 11.4% of jobless managers and executives started businesses in the first half of 2002--up from 7.9% in the same period a year ago. Frances Widnt, 47, of Baltimore, Md., is about to join them. Unable to land work as a real estate agent, she is considering kitchen design. "I've gone from being bruised to being excited," she says...