When Will Jobs Return
October 30, 2009
CNN Money
By Chris Isidore
The economy is growing again. So when are the jobs that go with growth going to get here?
Not anytime soon, unfortunately.
The consensus forecast is that job losses will continue through the end of this year, with many economists not expecting unemployment to peak until next summer. That will add to the 7.2 million jobs already lost in this downturn.
Even with Thursday’s report that showed the economy grew at a 3.5% annual rate in the third quarter, the continued job losses are not a shock.
Jobs are what are known as a trailing or lagging indicator, meaning that they change in response to other economic events, rather than predicting changes the way a leading indicator, such as the stock market, does. That’s because even after a recession has ended, employers are slow to add staff until they’re sure that demand has returned.
The real worry is that the deepest and longest recession since the Great Depression will be followed by a jobless recovery, just like what happened after the recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001.
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It took almost two years after the end of the 2001 recession before the economy started adding jobs on a consistent basis. And it wasn’t until February 2005 until the job market got back to the employment levels of four years earlier.
Some economists argue that the job losses in this downturn will prompt employers to start hiring at a rapid clip soon after the economy starts to improve.
“People cut so quickly that they cut things they shouldn’t have, not just fat but also muscle and bone,” said Robert Brusca of FAO Economics.
Many other economists were already looking for a tough labor market for at least the next year.
According to a survey by the National Association of Business Economics, the consensus forecast of 44 top economists is for an addition of only 12,000 jobs a month in the first quarter of next year.
The economists surveyed also indicated they don’t expect monthly job gains to top the 150,000 level — which is generally thought of as what is needed to keep pace with population growth — until the end of 2010.
And in the most troubling sign, more than a half of the economists surveyed said they didn’t expect a recovery to pre-recession levels in the job market until 2012 while a third said they didn’t believe a full job recovery would occur until 2013 or beyond. There are number of reasons for this pessimism.
Money to hire is tight
Small businesses are typically the engine of job growth, but their access to credit is still severely limited. That means that even if they’re confident about their future prospects, many small employers won’t be able to afford to add staff.
“Recessions that involve a financial crisis take a much longer time for there to be a jobs recovery,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “The credit crunch isn’t getting worse, but it’s still very tight.”
