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Business English: US unemployed see glimmers of hope
Many of the US indicators show improvement but there is still a long way to goThere are just 20 minutes to go before the Worknet jobs centre shuts down for the day and all the cubicles are empty except one.
Valerie Bickford, one of the Tampa Bay area's 130,000 unemployed, is rushing to finish an application. "I'm looking out of Florida and I'm looking out of the country. I will go just about anywhere as long as it isn't too cold," she said.
Ms Bickford has been out of work for two years, when she lost her job as a producer for the Home Shopping Network. Before that, Ms Bickford, who is also an interior designer, worked for the Clean Sweep home makeover reality show on TLC, a cable news channel.
She has noticed an encouraging trend in the US labour market - mainly from friends and acquaintances who are finding jobs. "It's definitely getting better. A year ago people were just panicked. Now that panic is subsiding," she says.
But the better conditions have yet to touch her. Ms Bickford fears her jobless benefits will run out at the end of the month. She has already tapped her 401(k) retirement plan and exhausted her savings - and her home is in foreclosure.
The US labour department will release its monthly report on the state of the jobs market on Friday. It is expected to show that job creation is continuing to chug along at a steady pace - with roughly 150,000 new positions created in January, marking the 16th consecutive month of growth in non-farm payrolls. However, this would be slightly slower than the 200,000 jobs created in December - an acceleration that many economists believe was temporary, driven by holiday hiring.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is expected to remain at 8.5 per cent, its lowest level since February 2009, shortly after Barack Obama took office as president in the depths of the financial crisis. Other jobs data have also been strong: weekly jobless claims fell 12,000 to 367,000 in January - a sign that companies are firing less workers.
"A lot of indicators have shown improvement but there is definitely a long way to go," says Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan Chase.
Indeed Ms Bickford's travails - which she related on the day of the Republican presidential primary in her state - are a glaring example of the economic malaise that continues to afflict millions of Americans and how far the US remains from a full labour market recovery. People in her situation - the long-term unemployed who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks - make up 42.5 per cent of the jobless population - a proportion that has only fallen slightly from 43.1 per cent last August.
"I've never been discouraged about it, and I try to stay away from people who are discouraged because I don't want them to bring me down," Ms Bickford says.
The Hamilton Project - part of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank - estimates that the US still has a "jobs gap" of 12.1m positions that would need to be filled to return the country to pre-recession levels of employment, accounting for population growth. If the US economy produced 208,000 new jobs per month, significantly better than the current trend, it would take until 2024 for the labour market to return to its previous health, Hamilton analysts calculated.
Back in Saint Petersburg, the Worknet centre is housed on the campus of a new 18-acre facility funded by the federal government to train people between the ages of 16 and 24 from low-income families, many of them minorities, to work in the healthcare and building industries.
Anita George, business community liaison there, says she also sees slow, steady progress. "There's a little blip on the radar, it's better than it was a year ago," she says. "We've been pretty pleased that the students that are ready to be job-placed are getting job-placed."
But the difficulty remains that most of her graduates don't have any job experience - and are having to compete with "people who have tons of experience" taking jobs that would normally go to her group.
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The Financial Times, 01.03.2012
© 2012 The Financial Times,
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