The unemployment rate climbed up above 10% in October, its highest rate since I was a year old, according to last week’s unemployment numbers. NYTimes calculates 10.1 million missing jobs since December 2007.
Another number that’s passed the “10″ mark: The DOW crept past 10,000 this week for only the second time in over a year. If I learned anything from Statistics 101, it’s that I don’t know enough about them, but put the sets of 10’s together and people are starting to talk about a new term: the jobless recovery.
From an NPR interview with Erica Groshen, labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: (10/16/09):
Ms. GROSHEN: I actually had our library do a literature search on jobless recovery, and there’s a quote from The New York Times in the mid-1930s, which is the first documented use of the term jobless recovery.KESTENBAUM: Groshen says the reason you don’t usually get jobless recoveries is that in typical recessions, employers say, okay, recession’s over. Come on back to work – just part of the cycle. In the last two recessions, though, things changed structurally.
Ms. GROSHEN: In the more recent recessions, it seems that we have more of employers using this as an opportunity to change what they are doing in a more basic way. They are closing inefficient facilities. They are culling their workforce. They are changing their production process.
KESTENBAUM: So, businesses became more efficient. That explained the growth. But it meant those workers had to find different jobs, and that takes time. That’s your jobless recovery. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, says it looks like we may be headed for one now, the third in a row. One reason: This recession was so severe, it killed a lot of businesses outright.
Professor LAWRENCE KATZ (Economics, Harvard University): If I just look out the window of my office, I see all sorts of empty storefronts of stores that have been around 20, 25 years, and restaurants that have survived previous recessions. Those stores are completely gone now. Something eventually will move into those buildings, but it’s going to take a very solid recovery before people will want to completely start a new business.
From the folds of the “jobless recovery” has emerged the long-term unemployed, the marginally attached, discouraged workers, and 9.2 “involuntarily part-time workers, the nouveau underemployed. We’re not just talking about middle-aged toxic mortgage holders and disoriented retirees. A record 26.7% of teenagers finds themselves unemployed too.
Makes me wonder if we aren’t talking about a dip in the road, but a fundamental change in our labor economy. What if we aren’t talking about a jobless recovery? What if we’re talking about the possible emergence of a part-time lifestyle?
While 1 in 10 is unemployed, 2 in 10 are in this somehow “not employed enough” job limbo, and
3 in 10 are independent workers. Freelancers, self-employed, independent contractors, part-time workers. And the numbers are growing. Tens of millions of pageviews a month go to freelancers and businesses trying to connect, from Craigslist (the de-facto job site), to Freelancer.com, Guru.com, Fixya.com, ServiceMagic, Care.com, RedBeacon, and millions of job boards and email classifieds lists. For the first time in history, we are not only no longer limited geographically in search of a talent pool, but professionals are no longer faced with choices between commuting and uprooting their families.
One big thing we can thank for this move towards office-less remote work is, unsurprisingly, the internet. We’ve replaced the anectodal file folders with digital files. Our address books are in the cloud and in our pockets. Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn and above all Google have succeeded in making us feel appropriately close to those who are far away. Google Enterprise, Salesforce, Intuit and hundreds of others have taken our businesses to the internet. The office as we know it is starting to disappear.
What happens if we aren’t so dependent on where we live for our livelihood? Suburbs blossomed around suburbs in the 1940’s, rustling our population from a rural base to where the jobs were. Westchester County was the nation’s first large-scale suburb, a proxy to New York City. But now you can get your food, your clothes, your entertainment and all of your friends on the internet. If we stop needing the city (as much) for work, will we find ourselves spreading back out across the rural nation?
In the 40’s with the explosion of suburbs, behavioral psychologist BF Skinner wrote of
Walden Two, a social utopia where no one worked more than four hours a day, and society was no less rich or cared for – from culture to healthcare – because they operated each part of their society more efficiently. They had an expectation of constantly experimenting with their processes and making them more efficient, from dish-washing to the educational system.
Visitors to Walden Two are assured by their host, Frazier, that they are not imposing.
“On the contrary,” said Frazier. “I’m fully paid for talking with you. Two labor credits are allowed each day for taking charge of guests of Walden Two…. Labor-credits are a sort of money…..All goods and services are free, as you saw in the dining room this evening. Each of us pays for what he uses with twelve hundred labor-credits each year.”
If the idea that the host would be compensated for his time sounds a little New Age, consider that clients at Solvate pay talented professionals for help with organizing their finances to transcribing interviews. The kind of work people will exchange changes dramatically when you consider that you can get help in less than full-time bites, and that you can make money doing meaningful work in less than full-time bites from the same computer you are looking for a new job, apartment or friend requests.
I am a long way from qualified to play the role of economist. But I look around at my talented, experienced friends who have been laid off, from the executive assistant at my last company to grad school grads in academia. The silent question is, “Am I good enough to get another job? Am I worth anything?” and the question in self-worth is as infuriating as it is relatable.
Solvate is trying to be part of the solution. For businesses that need access to help they cannot hire – whether they had to lay people off, or whether they’re any of the 25 million single-proprietor businesses, we are connecting them to top professionals in their field for support with HR,
bookkeeping, business plan modeling and even designing and printing
presentation collateral.
For now 100 and growing “underemployed,” Solvate is providing talented and motivated professionals access to meaningful part-time work in their field of expertise. A laid-off Conde Nast graphic designer in Brooklyn is supplementing his freelance work with projects for Solvate clients. An out-of-work Columbia journalism grad is taking on writing projects. A veteran entertainment executive assistant in LA decided to move her job home, and among her other clients handles monthly expense reports for a busy media executive and Solvate client in New York.
A lot of us will go back to work as the economy recovers. The sooner the better. But a lot of us might not go back right away, and maybe not at all, and we will have to find a better name for professional freelancers than “underemployed.” When I delegate a simple task to Solvate and feel the gratitude of a problem solved better than I could have or had time to, like finding a balloon bridge vendor in Union Square on a day’s notice for Halloween, I wonder if we aren’t talking about a new way of working together, on many things unexpected.
