Economy Recovered ! So Where's My Job?

First the numbers, then the pundits and finally President Obama told us in recent days that the economy has recovered. So, where's my job?, the unemployed are asking. Well, Duckie, it will be a long time coming back, if at all.

The numbers said that 1.1 million jobs where added in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2010 and retailers reported their strongest sales growth in a decade for March, causing the stock market to go up passed the "Eleven Thousand" symbolic threshold. So why is everybody still walking on eggs, instead of hiring to meet expected demand?

The problem is that this could very well be what the experts are calling "a jobless recovery." From 2007, when the recession began, to late 2009, when the first signs of recovery appeared, employers who survived did so with fewer workers. They became leaner and more productive with less people on the payroll and they are likely to stay that way for as long as possible.

That management fix has been gaining currency in corporate America for a very long time.
"More than two decades have passed since the modern layoff first appeared as a mass phenomenon in American life," writes Louis Uchitelle in his 2006 book, "The Disposable American." "Until that happened, companies tried to avoid layoffs. They were a sign of corporate failure and a violation of acceptable business behavior."

Uchitelle, like FED Chairman Ben Bernanke, could not have seen the depths of the coming "Great Recession," but his analysis of the impact of mass joblessness on the American physique describes what people are still suffering today. There are 8.4 million sad stories out there as a result of jobs lost during the recession. Uchitelle, after all, is only a reporter, albeit, a very good one. Bernanke, on the other hand, is paid to see the economic freight train going off the tracks.

Now that the wreckage is being cleared, what's next? "In an earlier era of much more faith in the payoff from public investment, President Eisenhower and Congress, to take one famous example, did not hesitate in the late fifties to authorize huge sums to get the United States into space...," Uchitelle reminds us. That investment, supported by subsequent administrations, produced not only jobs, but private sector investment in new technologies and countless industrial spinoffs.

Ironically, President Obama will be on the Space Coast tomorrow to tell us his plans for the future of the space program that was launched so long ago. Hopefully, it will take off as well.

And, That's That...