Unemployed swap pride for jobs
By Dawn Gilbertson
Arizona Republic
PHOENIX — Business owner Earl de Berge sees it in the job and education history on applications coming in for jobs that pay $7.50 an hour.
Mel Hannah, Urban League job counselor, hears it in the voices of laid-off workers begrudgingly throwing their hat into the ring for lower-level jobs.
Kelly Pinion, who has gone from making more than $80,000 a year to $8.50 an hour, feels it in her shrunken paycheck.
As the parade of corporate cuts continues — including in Hawai'i, which has seen hundreds of layoffs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — laid-off professionals frustrated by the airtight job market are increasingly considering jobs they would have turned up their noses at a year ago.
Call them overqualified, underemployed or downwardly mobile.
They're job hunters who are taking a huge step down the career ladder, at least temporarily, because they can no longer hold out for a job like the one they lost. They need a paycheck or benefits — now.
No employment statistics track the trading-down trend, and some economists say it appears less prevalent than it was during the last recession, when the unemployment rate was a point higher than today.
"The decibel level in 2002 is not nearly as high as in 1992," said Ken Goldstein, an economist with the Conference Board, a New York-based nonprofit research group. "You've got folks who are waiting for the dot-coms to come back; you have entrepreneurs who failed who are looking for the economy to come back so they can try it again. That's a much different sentiment than we had a decade ago."
Still, evidence abounds of a bleak hiring picture that is forcing those who have been out of work for months to settle for less, especially if they don't want to move.
Among the troubling signs:
• The Conference Board's monthly Help-Wanted Advertising Index, a key barometer of the country's job market, is at its lowest level in nearly 40 years. Help-wanted advertising volume is about half of what it was a year ago.
• Nearly 1 million people nationwide gave up their job searches in January, apparently discouraged by the prospects. That produced an unexpected drop in the unemployment rate.
• Just 38.4 percent of 1,800 executives surveyed late last year said they planned to add to their staffs in the first half of this year, according to a semiannual hiring survey by Management Recruiters International, a leading search and recruitment firm. A year ago, that figure was near 60 percent.
• Eighty percent of job consultants at Drake Beam Morin, polled last year by Fortune magazine, said white-collar job seekers are "sometimes" accepting titles and/or salaries below what they expected, and 13 percent said this is happening "often."
