SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) One in ten Americans in the U.S. workforce is now without a job. 190,000 jobs were lost in the last month. “It’s more than a number, its real people” Kim Watson says.
She sees the people behind those numbers every day at Utah Employment Services, a temporary job agency in West Valley City. She says as the job outlook grows more desperate, job seekers are willing to compromise, taking part-time, temporary positions, and less pay. “The competition is so stiff that while job seekers had two or three other candidates they were competing with in the past, now they have dozens even hundreds of people competing for the same job and if they don’t get it, they are more likely to say well, OK, I guess if I can’t get that I am willing to not get the pay that I am accustomed to or maybe even willing to commute further.”
She says because the unemployed are giving up pay and hours, they are working more. “because they are compromising with their wage so much, they are ending up having to get a second or third job.”
34,000 jobs were added by temporary help services like Utah Employment Services last month. Zion’s Bank Economist, Jeff Thredgold says employers are facing increasing demand but are bringing on temporary workers until they are sure their higher sales are permanent. He says it is another sign the economy is growing. “It’s not unusual when the economy starts to grow again that we still have unemployment rising, we still have job losses. It takes a while for the confidence to get back.”
Thredgold also says there will likely be and ebb and flow of good, and bad, job news in the months ahead. “You are going to see more good news, and bad news come in the employment sectors as we see good news coming from a whole lot of other sectors.”
Thredgold says that means the unemployment rate will probably inch a little higher, and there will be months of job loss and job gain, but he says, at least we are headed in the right direction. “The job numbers actually weren’t all that bad, we lost 190,000 jobs and that’s terrible, it was worse than expected, but at the first of this year we were losing 700-thousand jobs a month.”
He says we are coming off of the longest, deepest, and the most painfully costly, most pervasive recession since the great depression. Thredgold says we have already come a long way. He says two things must happen for Utah to climb out of the recession. First, he says, the U.S. economy must start growing again, and second, the global economy must start growing again. He says both are now happening, and he anticipates the recession in the beehive state will be over by mid-2010.
Meanwhile, he and Watson say those looking for work should not give up.
