During robust economic times, college students in undergraduate and graduate school programs would easily get multiple offers. As the economy teeters on the edge of recession, college graduates this year face a tough job market, leaving many without work in their fields or doing jobs that people without college degrees can do, career center officials said. Most affected, the officials said, are those looking to break into the financial services industry, hard hit by the subprime mortgage crisis.
The numbers aren't pretty. Unemployment among 20- to 24-year-olds, the typical post-undergraduate age group, is sharply higher than the overall population. In the second quarter of this year, joblessness among this group reached 9.8 percent, according to the Labor Department. That is up from 7.7 percent last year at this time and 8.1 percent in the second quarter of 2001, about the time the last recession hit. Overall, unemployment rose to 5.7 percent in July from 5.5 percent the previous month, and the economy lost 51,000 payroll jobs.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers said employers offered higher starting salaries this year. That said, the increase in hiring recent college grads, especially in the financial services industry, has dropped considerably. Employers were expected to increase hiring 8 percent for the class of 2008, sharply below the 17.4 percent surge for the class of 2007.
(emphasis added)
The Class War which has been raging for almost 30 years reached its apogee this year with the mortgage crisis. Globalization, outsourcing, ther Race to the Bottom, have all had the effect they were meant to have - eliminating millions of workers by eliminating millions of job.
We in the underclass were the first to be told to get what we could when we could or starve, nobody really cared which. We tried to tell you that that attitude was going to work up the chain, that this particular snake will start swallowing itself when it runs out of all other food and that the middle class was next.
Well, it's here. I'm not gloating. I'm frustrated at the blindness and selfishness that allowed corporate scum to steal the country right out from under us all. They've turned America into a fascist nation in the sense that during the Bush Years the interests of Corporate America and the Bush Administration were identical. So entwined was the Bush Govt with the corporate agenda that he started an oil war to keep the energy industry happy. Every agency, it seems, was headed by an ex-corporate lawyer, lobbyist, or CEO from the industry the agency was supposed to regulate, and even when they weren't the crimes of corporate negligence went unnoticed let alone punished (Crandall Canyon, Imperial Sugar, BP Houston, etc.)
But it's the automation begun in the Nixon Years and the Globalization Movement of the Bush 1 Years that did the most long-term damage to American jobs and pauperized the workers who might have had them but for the fact that a machine was doing them here and children in labor camps were doing them in Sri Lanka. Twenty years ago we began losing the jobs we do by the barrel to low-wage countries where environmentalism was non-existant and so were labor laws - a bigger consideration for many corpo's than mere wages.
Then, during Bush 2, the corpo's started outsourcing mid-level tech jobs, too - to India, primarily - because programmers there cost less than half what programmers here cost and the world wide web is, well, world wide. The customer service reps didn't have to be in the US, they could do their job on the intertubes from anywhere.
But the employee cost-cutting didn't stop there. There were, after all, so many low-level employees who could be cut before the machinery of business ground to a halt, and when they were gone the only way to keep the party going was to start firing mid-level executives - all the white-collar guys who thought they were safe. Now you can spend $hundreds of thousands$ on a college education - which you have to have to get anywhere at all - and still wind up without a job because there aren't enough of them to go around. The so-called "economic growth" of the last 8 years has largely been on paper, and the paper is dissolving faster than it can be read.
The good news in all this is that the greed of the oil companies has finally made transportation costs so outrageously high that some American companies are actually thinking of - wait for it! - opening up operations in the US again!
The world economy has become so integrated that shoppers find relatively few T-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart and Target carrying a “Made in the U.S.A.” label. But globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology.
Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.
“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.”
So there may be a serious upside - more jobs here in America - to $4/gal gas than we ever thought.
I ain't holdin' my breath, though.
jrmas spoke of Elizabeth Warren's work in the previous thread.
From 42:50 to 47:31 here, the Harvard Law Professor speaks about the college diploma.
(For anyone who has not seen this lecture, it is worth watching. You can start in at 6:20 and not miss anything important.)
Posted by: CMike | August 03, 2008 at 06:36 PM
As in the past, the university diploma is only appropriate for a small percentage of the total labor force. The fact that so much more of the population than capacity is already in the postsecondary pipeline and most of them won't be able to find jobs immediately after graduation will really be a wakeup call to the next generation thinking about what major they should choose... I would recommend survival - it's a good course to take.
Posted by: Vern M. | March 25, 2009 at 06:13 PM