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Mix-Ansicht- USA: Jobs zu $43.000 gehen verloren, neue zu $36.000 werden geschaffen - kingsolomon, 09.11.2003, 15:01
USA: Jobs zu $43.000 gehen verloren, neue zu $36.000 werden geschaffen
-->Der letzte Arbeitsmarktbericht hat auch gezeigt: der Trend geht Richtung MacJobs
November 9, 2003
Despite Jobs Spurt, Executives Remain Cautious
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 — Two weeks ago, the Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, ventured a prediction that struck many economists as dangerously brash: rapid economic growth in the United States could produce as many as 200,000 new jobs a month over the next year.
But Saturday, a day after the government announced that the country added about 126,000 jobs in October, Mr. Snow had reason to feel at least partly vindicated.
"I'm not in the business of making estimates," he said in a telephone interview on Friday."But, I do feel that with the continuing strong recovery we're going to see jobs pick up in the coming months."
It is far too early for Mr. Snow to declare victory. Even though economic growth surged at a rapid annual rate of 7.2 percent in the third quarter of this year, business executives around the country say they are still cautious about expanding their work forces and building factories.
And a new economic study, prepared for the United States Conference of Mayors, concludes that wages are significantly lower in the service sectors that are adding jobs than in the manufacturing industries that have been losing jobs.
According to the study, prepared by the economic consulting firm Global Insight, the biggest job growth over the next two years will be in the areas of administration and support services, health care, travel and tourism.
The average wage in those sectors over the next two years is expected to be $36,000, the study concluded. By contrast, the average wage in manufacturing sectors that lost jobs is $43,000.
"While you see jobs coming back, they are not coming back in the same sectors," said Kwame M. Kilpatrick, the mayor of Detroit."Cities like Detroit have to struggle to find their niche."
Last month's jump in employment was more than twice what most economists had been predicting, and it came on top of new data showing that job growth in September was twice as high as the government originally estimated one month ago.
The upshot: after losing about 2.8 million jobs since early 2001, most of them in manufacturing, the country has abruptly added nearly 250,000 over the past two months. Given the natural growth of the nation's work force, the economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs a month before unemployment will drop much below its current level of 6.0 percent.
Still, the numbers could be very good news for President Bush, whose record on jobs, one of the worst of any president in the last century, has been among his biggest obstacles to re-election next November.
Notwithstanding the recent jump in jobs, corporate executives say they are still trying to squeeze extra production out of existing workers rather than hire new ones.
Jeffrey A. Joerres, chief executive officer of Manpower Inc., the temporary employment company that is based in Milwaukee, said his corporate customers were not asking for nearly as many workers as the new employment data might suggest.
"We feel a pickup, but it doesn't seem to be as robust as the numbers would indicate," he said.
The Union Pacific Corporation, the big freight rail company, is preparing for a year of strong growth. But although the company is hiring, it expects productivity gains to allow it to keep its overall work force around its current size of 46,300 people or somewhat fewer.
"We're going to handle more business with fewer people," said Jim Young, Union Pacific's chief financial officer.
In its regular survey last month of chief executives at large companies, the Business Roundtable found that 71 percent of the executives expect their sales to increase in 2004 but only 12 percent expect to expand their work forces.
"Productivity continues to astonish everybody," said Henry A. McKinnell, chief executive of Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical producer. While executives are far more optimistic about next year than they were just a few months ago, he said, their mood is still"not ebullient."
In themselves, the new job numbers are not that impressive. By comparison with the rebound in jobs after other recessions, including the so-called jobless recovery of 1991, the pace of job creation now remains anemic.
In a speech on Thursday, a day before the Labor Department released the October employment data, a Federal Reserve governor, Ben S. Bernanke, took pains to emphasize that the labor market remained weak.
In contrast to previous downturns, he said, the vast majority of layoffs in recent years have been explicitly permanent rather than temporary. A study published this summer by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded that many of the manufacturing jobs lost over the past few years would not be replaced. The reason: Companies have made fundamental improvements in productivity and they are shipping more work overseas.
After an extensive review of all the possible reasons for the sluggish labor market, Mr. Bernanke said he was convinced that the biggest cause was the stunning growth in productivity — the amount of goods or services produced per worker.
Indeed, the government reported on Thursday that productivity shot up at a blazing annual rate of 8.1 percent in third quarter, which ended in September, and that followed increases of 5 percent since late 2001.
Diane Swonk, chief economist at the Bank One Corporation in Chicago, said the job picture would almost certainly improve because companies would find themselves under increasing pressure to keep up with rising demand.
Banks and financial institutions are already strengthening their work forces. Merrill Lynch, which slashed 20,000 jobs in the past three years, announced on Thursday that it planned to hire 650 new brokers by the end of next year.
But even if the pace of hiring in October gathers additional strength, adding more than 150,000 a month, many economists still contend that unemployment will decline only modestly by the end of next year. For those who are out of work or forced to accept lower-paying jobs, that kind of recovery may not feel like much of a cause for celebration.
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