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U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio
Image by Renegade98
By PETER S. GOODMAN
September 27, 2009.
Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.
Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.
And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.
“There’s too much uncertainty out there,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “There’s not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing.”
The dearth of jobs reflects the caution of many American businesses when no one knows what will emerge to propel the economy. With unemployment at 9.7 percent nationwide, the shortage of paychecks is both a cause and an effect of weak hiring.
In Milwaukee, Debbie Kransky has been without work since February, when she was laid off from a medical billing position — her second job loss in two years. She has exhausted her unemployment benefits, because her last job lasted for only a month.
Indeed, in a perverse quirk of the unemployment system, she would have qualified for continued benefits had she stayed jobless the whole two years, rather than taking a new position this year. But since her latest unemployment claim stemmed from a job that lasted mere weeks, she recently drew her final check of 0.
Ms. Kransky, 51, has run through her life savings of roughly ,000. Her job search has garnered little besides anxiety.
“I’ve worked my entire life,” said Ms. Kransky, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. “I’ve got October rent. After that, I don’t know. I’ve never lived month to month my entire life. I’m just so scared, I can’t even put it into words.”
Last week, Ms. Kransky was invited to an interview for a clerical job with a health insurance company. She drove her Jeep truck downtown and waited in the lobby of an office building for nearly an hour, but no one showed. Despondent, she drove home, down in gasoline.
For years, the economy has been powered by consumers, who borrowed exuberantly against real estate and tapped burgeoning stock portfolios to spend in excess of their incomes. Those sources of easy money have mostly dried up. Consumption is now tempered by saving; optimism has been eclipsed by worry.
Meanwhile, some businesses are in a holding pattern as they await the financial consequences of the health care reforms being debated in Washington.
Even after companies regain an inclination to expand, they will probably not hire aggressively anytime soon. Experts say that so many businesses have pared back working hours for people on their payrolls, while eliminating temporary workers, that many can increase output simply by increasing the workload on existing employees.
“They have tons of room to increase work without hiring a single person,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute Economist. “For people who are out of work, we do not see signs of light at the end of the tunnel.”
Even typically hard-charging companies are showing caution.
During the technology bubble of the late 1990s and again this decade, Cisco Systems — which makes Internet equipment — expanded rapidly. As the sense takes hold that the recession has passed, Cisco is again envisioning double-digit rates of sales growth, with plans to move aggressively into new markets, like the business of operating large scale computer data servers.
Yet even as Cisco pursues such designs, the company’s chief executive, John T. Chambers, said in an interview Friday that he anticipated “slow hiring,” given concerns about the vigor of growth ahead. “We’ll be doing it selectively,” he said.
Two recent surveys of newspaper help-wanted advertisements and of employers’ inclinations to add workers were at their lowest levels on record, noted Andrew Tilton, a Goldman Sachs economist.
Job placement companies say their customers are not yet wiling to hire large numbers of temporary workers, usually a precursor to hiring full-timers.
“It’s going to take quite some time before we see robust job growth,” said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of Adecco North America, a major job placement and staffing company.
During the last recession, in 2001, the number of jobless people reached little more than double the number of full-time job openings, according to the Labor Department data. By the beginning of this year, job seekers outnumbered jobs four-to-one, with the ratio growing ever more lopsided in recent months.
Though layoffs have been both severe and prominent, the greatest source of distress is a predilection against hiring by many American businesses. From the beginning of the recession in December 2007 through July of this year, job openings declined 45 percent in the West and the South, 36 percent in the Midwest and 23 percent in the Northeast.
Shrinking job opportunities have assailed virtually every industry this year. Since the end of 2008, job openings have diminished 47 percent in manufacturing, 37 percent in construction and 22 percent in retail. Even in education and health services — faster-growing areas in which many unemployed people have trained for new careers — job openings have dropped 21 percent this year. Despite the passage of a stimulus spending package aimed at shoring up state and local coffers, government job openings have diminished 17 percent this year.
In the suburbs of Chicago, Vicki Redican, 52, has been unemployed for almost two years, since she lost her ,000-a-year job as a sales and marketing manager at a plastics company. College-educated, Ms. Redican first sought another management job. More recently, she has tried and failed to land a cashier’s position at a local grocery store, and a barista slot at a Starbucks coffee shop.
Substitute teaching assignments once helped her pay the bills. “Now, there are so many people substitute teaching that I can no longer get assignments,” she said.
“I’ve learned that I can’t look to tomorrow,” she said. “Every day, I try to do the best I can. I say to myself, ‘I don’t control this process.’ That’s the only way you can look at it. Otherwise, you’d have to go up on the roof and crack your head open.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/business/economy/27jobs.html
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Got to go to the visa office this morning because i had to renew my tourist visa to get my working visa… No 365 pictures update this weekend sorry guyz (still no computer at home)
Murder of Clara Ann Smith at 17,Trinity Street St Philips Bristol 1835
Image by brizzle born and bred
Mary Ann Burdock was an attractive, 30-year-old landlady who fell for a young sailor called Charles Wade who was lodging in her house. He told her that, much that he would like to, he could not marry her because he lacked the wherewithall to open a shop and could not, therefore, keep them both.
Another of Mary’s lodgers was Mrs Clara Smith. She was elderly but had savings of several thousand pounds which she kept in a cash box under her bed.
By early 1835 Mary was becoming desperate for the funds to help Charles. She knew, of course, about the cache under the old woman’s bed so decided to get rid of her.
This she did with the aid of poison.
Once the old lady was out of the way she gave the money to Wade and contemplated a life of marital bliss with the young man.
Unfortunately for Mary things did not go according to plan. A relative of Mrs Smith was suspicious when he heard from Mary that the old woman ‘died very poor.’
He knew that the old woman had a considerable amount hidden away and communicated this information to the police. The body was exhumed and arsenic was found in the corpse.
Mary was arrested, tried and found guilty of murder. Her execution, in April 1835, was not attended by her intended.
Born near Ross-on-Wye, she was a fresh-faced country girl when she had first arrived in the city looking to enter service.
At the Bristol fair she was hired as a house servant by a Mr Plumley, a poulterer, who lived in St Nicholas Street. She stayed with him for 18 months but was eventually dismissed due to thieving. When Plumley refused her a reference she immediately flounced into a solicitor’s office instructing him to sue for damages over unfair dismissal.
But, bored with waiting for the case to come up, Mary met, and quickly married, a Mr Agar, a Bristol tailor. But she didn’t stay with the boring tailor for long – soon deserting him for Thomas, the Mayor’s coachman.
Next in line was a wealthy wine merchant and Mary soon found that she had enough money to rent her own house in Limekiln Lane, down by the docks in Hotwells. But the constant comings and goings of drunken seamen eventually got too much for Mary’s more respectable neighbours and they decided to drum her out of the neighbourhood.
Undeterred, Mary then fell in with a Mr Wade, a steam packet steward whom she had met in a dockside tavern. They opened a St Philips lodging house together in Trinity Street and when Wade died she married one of the lodgers, a Mr Burdock.
Another lodger there was a sick, elderly widow called Clara Smith. When Mary discovered that the widow had been left a small fortune – £3,000 – by her ironmonger husband, she soon wheedled her way into the woman’s confidence.
She found time to nurse the widow and soon managed to get her to hand over the money for ‘safe keeping’. Within a short while £500 had gone but Mary couldn’t wait to get her hands on the rest. She ordered her husband out to buy some arsenic and then mixed it in with warm milk for the frail widow’s nightcap.
Clara didn’t survive long and was buried in St. Augustine’s graveyard (this church has now been demolished – the newish extension of the Marriott Royal Hotel covers the site).
www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/2053435768/
Mary and her husband were the only mourners – the widow’s relatives, a nephew and three nieces, had not been told of her death. when they found out – and then discovered that her savings had gone missing – they went straight to the police.
Questioned, Mary bluffed it out, but her long-suffering servant-girl, Mary Ann, spilt the beans. She told police that she had seen her mistress pour some yellow powder into a bowl and – then give it to Mrs Smith.
That night, with doctors and police present, screens went up and the body was exhumed. Arsenic had preserved the body so well that the case went into the medical textbooks.
Although Mary’s trial at the Guildhall lasted three days, the result was a foregone conclusion.
But while awaiting sentence she impressed everyone with her fortitude. She told the carpenter to line her coffin with flannel and the prison matron to make sure that she had a warm, comfortable shroud. She then kept it by her bedside.
The elm coffin, made to her own specifications, was carried into the ‘ condemned cell; the next day she had an appointment with the hangman.
ON the day, an incredible 50,000 people jostled with each other, all trying to find the best vantage point. Others tried their hardest not to get themselves pushed into the river as the crowd stretched 200 yards along Coronation Road.
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Suddenly an absolute hush fell on the huge crowd. Two figures had appeared on the scaffold – erected overnight above the entrance to Bristol’s New Gaol in Cumberland Road. (still standing today)
One was a public executioner, the other a woman dressed in black, her face hidden by a white hood and her arms pinioned at her side. In one hand she held a handkerchief, which she would drop when she had finished her prayers and decided that the time had come to meet her maker.
Then, as the crowd tensed, the short life of poisoner Mary Ann Burdock came quickly to an end.
She was the first woman to be hanged on the New Drop at the Gaol, the gates of which still stand today.
The good citizens had not seen a woman die for 22 years, when two had been hanged at Pile Hill for murdering a child.
Mary’s fatal mistake had been to use arsenic on her victim – for arsenic is the pathologist’s best friend, preserving vital organs for future post mortems long after a burial has taken place.
WILLIAM HERAPATH
He will always be remembered as a famous Chemical Analyst.
He gave evidence in many famous court cases involving poisoning and murder.
More than able to give a good account of his subject under cross-examination, he was the first person to detect arsenic in the body of a person who had been dead and buried for over fourteen months, as in the trial of Mary Ann Burdock in 1835 who was accused of murdering Mrs. Clara Ann Smith by arsenic poisoning, she was a 60-year-old lady who was lodging at Mrs. Burdocks boarding house at 17, Trinity Street. It was some time after the lodgers death that relatives became suspicious that Mrs Burdock appeared considerably wealthier since Clara had died and they had received no money, so the coroner ordered the exhumation and examination of Clara, when it was proved her stomach contained huge amounts of arsenic.
Mrs Burdock was hanged at the New Gaol on April 15th.1835, it is said there were 50,000 spectators.
