Stan Slayton searches from day to day, but he usually comes up empty-handed. So does Wendy Berger Shapiro. But their searches are at the polar ends of today’s very unusual, very quixotic job market.
All Slayton wants is a decent blue-collar job, paying enough to care for a wife and three kids. But for the veteran warehouse worker, it’s not out there, or at least not within his grasp.
“You can’t find anything. If you do, it’s in the suburbs, and it’s tough when you don’t have a car to get out there,” he grumbles despairingly as he waits to talk to a counselor at the Illinois Job Service office at 51st Street and Cicero Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. He is there looking for a job. Again.
All Shapiro wants are the brightest and best Internet designers for Neoglyphics Media Corp., her two-year-old firm in Chicago’s Bucktown area. Widely viewed as a hot company, its ranks have doubled in the last year, and it is hiring constantly to keep up with an endless flood of work.
You’d think she’d have no problem filling the ranks, but her 95-worker company has to scrounge for its highly prized cyber-gurus.
“It is a tremendous challenge,” says Shapiro, director of operations. “Our business is exploding and one of our biggest restraints is an inability to meet clients’ demands.”
Spread between Slayton and Shapiro is the reality of today’s job market, a place quite generous to some, modestly rewarding to others, and brutal toward those. Those with hot skills in hot industries do very well while those with out-of-date skills in shrinking or flat industries do not.
Such a complex picture is probably baffling to those who look only at the months of record low unemployment rates in the U.S. and especially the Midwest, at the sea of help-wanted signs that dot the malls and downtowns from Chicago to Indianapolis, Peoria to Saginaw and at the complaints of Midwest companies that say they must cut their output due to a lack of workers.
But powerful tensions and broad gaps exist within this Oz-like job market, which helps explain some workers’ persistent insecurity and timidity.
“Workers should be much more full of themselves. They should be saying,`Ah ha, finally it’s my turn.’ But they are not,” says John Stanek, president of Chicago-based International Survey Research, which regularly checks workers’ views.
Although the U.S. economy is in relatively good shape, and layoffs have ebbed from peaks reached several years ago, his surveys show that nearly 44 percent of American workers frequently worry about being laid off. That’s over twice the rate in 1990, when the U.S. economy was headed into a recession.
In the last few years, most measures of workers’ confidence have slightly trended upward. Yet Stanek says the numbers remain markedly out of kilter with prior periods because workers have been traumatized by the changes they have seen in the job market in the 1990s.
Who are the real winners in this job market?
Those with not only advanced skills, but more than one.
They fit the category of “gold-collar worker,” suggests Eric Greenberg, head of research for the New York-based American Management Association, a non-profit research and training organization.
“It’s a marketing guy who knows about finance,” Greenberg explains.
Technology-related jobs sit at the top of the pyramid of winning careers.
“The higher the skill level, the harder it is to find people,” says Gretchen Kreske, manager of strategic information for Manpower Inc., the giant personnel firm in Milwaukee.
To slake the thirst for technology workers, Manpower provides its own training for the people it finds for companies.
Similarly, the need to blend different skills shows up among telemarketing workers. And for these, there is a booming market, according to Kreske. With good computer and service skills, they can start at $12 an hour at high-tech telemarketing centers.
The turnaround in banking has created a need for managers and technical experts. Meanwhile, the need for tellers continues to dwindle as the banking industry becomes more automated, and mergers wipe out branches.
Not so long ago corporations virtually discarded older managers, swapping them for younger workers with different and newer skills, in an effort to reshape their work forces. Because of age discrimination laws, they could not be so blatant. But the process drove thousands of mid-level managers from their jobs.
Today that thinking is abating somewhat, says Michael Flynn, general manager in the Chicago offices of Lee Hecht Harrison, an outplacement firm.
“There is a wisdom piece missing in some firms,” says Flynn. “I am seeing some real interest in the over-50 group.”
Who are the faded flowers in today’s job market?
They are factory workers without high school degrees or specific skills. If they had these skills or degrees in hand they might be able to fill the better jobs that are going empty at Midwest factories.
The losers are blue-collar workers in big city neighborhoods, who do not have cars or a way to transport them to the suburbs, where good jobs often await.
“There is definitely a discrepancy based on skills,” says Rick Kaglic, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
The cities have the workers, and the suburbs have the jobs, he says. The problem is making a connection between the two.
Stan Slayton, for example, has a car, but its transmission needs to be fixed, and he cannot afford it. The result: He cannot consider better-paying job offers from the suburbs, which is the case for many workers at the state’s West Side Chicago Job Service office.
So, too, the losers in today’s job market are clerical workers who do not have computer skills. They are health-care managers caught up in the industry’s shrinkage. And they are lawyers, who once roamed a lucrative field, but are today trapped in a market flush with attorneys.
Ann Seay, who helps workers find jobs at the state’s Job Service office near Midway Airport, has been encouraged in recent months by a spurt of job applications. Yet she wishes the blue-collar jobs were better-paying than $8 or $10 an hour.
Many firms, she says, appear to be turning over job searches to employment agencies rather than coming to the state for help. If they came directly to the state, she thinks they might be able to cut their costs and boost salaries.
Nowadays, she also gets referrals from companies that want to pay clerks $7 an hour, but they must have computer skills.
