Because of the recent recession, the U.S. economy has suffered from a shortage of jobs, as evidenced by the rise in the unemployment rate. There is a natural temptation under these conditions to fear that this temporary setback is the beginning of some permanent reversal of fortune, that the shortage of jobs is here to stay and will only grow worse.

Again and again, serious and influential voices have raised the cry that the sky is falling. It never does. The root of their error is always the same: confusing a temporary, cyclical downturn with a permanent reduction in the economy’s job-creating capacity.

In recent years, many Americans have lost their jobs and suffered hardship. Many more have worried that their jobs would be next. There is no point in denying these hard realities, but just as surely there is no point in blowing them out of proportion. The U.S. economy is not running out of good jobs; it is merely coming out of a recession. And regardless of whether economic times are good or bad, some amount of job turnover is an inescapable fact of life in any market economy.

Truth 2 – Challenging, high-paying jobs are becoming more plentiful, not less

The ongoing growth in total employment is frequently dismissed on the ground that most of the new positions being created are low-paying, dead-end “McJobs.” The facts show otherwise.

Managerial and specialized professional jobs have grown rapidly, nearly doubling between 1993 and 2003, from 23.6 million to 42.5 million. These challenging, high-paying positions have jumped from 23.4 percent of total employment to 31.1 percent.

In addition, these high-quality jobs will continue growing in the years to come. According to projections for 2003-12 prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, management, business, financial, and professional positions will grow from 43.2 million

Truth 3 – "Off-shoring" is expected to increase and so will U.S. information technology employment.

Information Technology Association of America predicted in a widely cited study that 3.3 million white-collar jobs – including 1.7 million back-office positions and 473,000 IT jobs will move overseas between 2000 and 2015.

Despite the trend toward off-shoring, IT related employment is expected to see healthy increases in the years to come. According to Department of Labor projections, the total number of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations will jump from 3.02 million in 2002 to 4.07 million in 2012 – a 35 percent increase. Thus, the recent downturn in IT is only a temporary break in a larger trend of long-term job growth.

Truth 4 – The digital revolution has been eliminating white-collar jobs for many years

The attention now being paid to off-shoring creates the impression that it is an utterly unprecedented phenomenon. However, the very same technological advances that are making off-shoring possible have been eliminating large number of white-collar jobs for many years now.

Voicemail has replaced receptionists; back-office record keeping and other clerical jobs have been supplanted by computers; layers of middle management have been eliminated by better internal communications systems. In all these cases, jobs are not simply being transferred overseas; they are being consigned to oblivion by automation and the resulting reorganization of work processes.

Truth 5 – The number of jobs grows with the population

The total number of jobs in the American economy is first and foremost a function of the size of the labor force. As the population grows, the number of people in the work force grows; then market forces absorb that supply and deploy labor to different sectors of the economy.

Consider all the major events that have increased the supply of labor during the last half-century. The baby boom, the surge in work force participation by women, and rising rates of immigration. Consider as well the key developments that have slashed demand for certain kinds of labor: the growing competitiveness of foreign producers and falling U.S. barriers to imports; the shift by American companies toward globally integrated production and the consequent relocation of many operations overseas; the deregulation of the transportation, energy, and telecommunications industries and the wrenching restructuring that followed; and most important, the many waves of labor-saving technological innovations, from dial phones that replaced switchboard operators to the factory-floor robots that replaced assembly-line workers to the automatic teller machines that replaced bank tellers.

Yet, in the face of all this flux, a growing economy and functioning labor markets were all that was needed to accommodate huge shifts in labor supply and demand. Now and in the future, flexibility in labor markets will suffice to generate increasing employment.

Facts About the U.S. Job Market

• Roughly, 14.3 million U.S. workers are unemployed or underemployed.
• Almost 44 million individuals in the U.S., most of them in working families, have no health coverage.
• Approximately 690,000 U.S. jobs have been moved abroad since 2001. Fourteen million white-collar jobs could move overseas in the years to come.
• George W. Bush is the first president to preside over a net job loss since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.
• Women, particularly single mothers, are bearing the brunt of the jobs crisis.
• The current 5.6 percent unemployment rate is below the average of the 1980s (7.3 percent) and ‘90s (5.8 percent.)
• The U.S. information tech sector lost 403,300 jobs from March 2001 through April 2004.
• Though 75 percent of jobs are created by small companies, according to the Small Business Administration, this sector’s entrepreneurial activity and the jobs it creates are left out by Washington bean counters when calculating official new job numbers.

Sources: AFL-CIO, “Show Us the Jobs: America’s Jobs Crisis,” 2004;
NewsMax.com; University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois;
Research paper from the Kato Institute Center for Trade Policy Studies

Joe Hodowanes, a career strategy adviser in Tampa, Florida, offers a free resume and career analysis. Fax your resume to (813) 936-0201 or email it to jmwanes@jmwanes.com For questions, call Joe at (813) 936-0091 or visit www.jmwanes.com on the Web. All Job Search Advisor articles on this website are the property of www.jmwanes.com (J.M. Wanes & Associates). You may download
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