This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 21, 2011 - The job -- working nights for a contractor remodeling a Walmart store -- is physically demanding and an hour's drive from Kevin Wilson's home in St. Louis.
The pay -- $15 an hour -- is half as much as he made in his worst year in business management.
In the language of unemployment, this would be considered a "survival job." But Wilson, 51, who was laid off in spring 2009, was glad to get it, even though moving and rebuilding store counters is strenuous labor -- not something he's done much of in recent years. The pay is about twice as much as Wilson said he took home in unemployment benefits.
"I'm not afraid of physical work," Wilson said, adding that in his youth he helped his dad, a "weekend farmer" in South Dakota.
Of course, that was a college degree and several decades of business experience ago.
Wilson takes a pragmatic view.
"I need to be doing something," he said. "You can only sit at home or try to make networking contacts and respond to want ads so long before you start losing your edge."
Nearly two years into his job search, Wilson said it is important to keep moving. To keep plugging away.
On Tuesday mornings, for example, he attends the GO! Network, a support and networking group for out-of-work business professionals that meets downtown at the St. Patrick Center. Wilson volunteers as chairman of the group's program committee.
Like many of his colleagues at GO! Network, Wilson lost his job after the financial meltdown of 2008, when businesses were shedding workers by the thousands. Wilson, who was employed by a firm that provided consultants to small and medium-sized businesses, said his assignments simply stopped coming.
Last year, Wilson worked several months for the U.S. Census, another survival job that allowed him to temporarily go off unemployment.
By his own description, Wilson is "severely underemployed" -- a status shared by countless working- and middle-class Americans who are still struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession that economists say ended in June 2009.
While there is no official tally of the number of Americans who, like Wilson, are working survival jobs, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does track "persons employed part time for economic reasons." In March, 8.4 million people were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
The Loss of the 'Middle' Ground
One can argue that an unemployment rate of 8.8 percent means that more than 90 percent of Americans are working. But those percentages don't tell the personal story of the 6.1 million Americans identified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as long-term unemployed: out of work for 27 or more weeks.
And those numbers don't include the so-called 99ers -- Americans who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and no longer show up in the Labor Department's statistics. Estimates for 99ers range from just under 2 million to more than 5 million Americans.
Job growth is not coming quickly enough for the 13.5 million Americans who are unemployed, acknowledged Christina Romer, the former chair of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, during a panel at Washington University last week, the Beacon reported.
And in a recent commentary in the New York Times, she pointed to a general lack of hiring. Romer, now an economics professor at the University of California Berkeley, said that jobs remain scarce in all sectors of the economy -- and in all regions.
Although Romer insisted that this isn't a "jobless" recovery, but a "growthless" one, the bottom line is that even as the nation's economic activity has improved, the job market hasn't.
St. Louis Federal Reserve economist Natalia Kolesnikova and researcher Yang Liu studied the severity of the nation's unemployment by comparing the recovery from the Great Recession to previous recessions. In the April issue of the Regional Economist, they wrote that the current recovery is not only similar to two previous "jobless" recoveries -- in the 1990s and early 2000s -- but that "persistent and unusually high unemployment suggests that this recovery might be more painful than the previous two."
Researchers studying the impact of long-term joblessness have found economic and social consequences. Among them: a prolonged effect on the earnings of college graduates who enter the workforce during a recession, increases in property crime, negative changes in eating habits, and even a decline in the marriage rate.
Some economists have suggested that the nation's stubbornly high jobless rate is due to a mismatch between the unemployed and job opportunities -- the product of a decades-long erosion of "middle-skill" jobs.
According to research by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Great Recession accelerated what had been a 30-year trend: the loss of middle-skill white- and blue-collar jobs to automation or off-shoring.
Autor tracked four middle-skill occupations: sales, office and administrative workers, production workers and operators. He found that those jobs accounted for more than 57 percent of U.S. employment in 1979 but just 45 percent in 2009.
The loss of middle-skill jobs has been contributing to what Autor describes as a polarized employment market: There are high-skill, high-wage white-collar jobs and low-skill, low-wage service jobs, but not a lot of options in the middle. At the same time, he found that wage gains for the "middle" jobs were smaller than wage gains at either the upper or lower reaches.
Autor's research, by the way, showed that this polarization wasn't limited to the U.S., but widespread across the world's industrialized economies.
'It's People Who Drive the Economy'
Longtime St. Louis labor analyst Russ Signorino says the current recovery has been particularly painful because it is taking so many Americans a very long time to find new jobs.
"A lot of these people are really struggling more than they would have if they were affected by a previous recession because their length of unemployment would have been shorter. They're having problems paying bills or they're losing their homes and they're losing their cars," he said.
Signorino disagrees that the recovery is either jobless or no-growth, he calls it a "slow-growth recovery."
"There are some jobs being created," he said. "The problem is the growth rate isn't fast enough to make a significant dent in the unemployment rate in a relatively short period of time. It's going to take a long time for a lot of people who are unemployed to get back to work, and then also after that, to get their incomes back up somewhere close to where they were when they were working previously."
Because the American economy has changed so much from the late 1970s -- and because of the depth of the recession -- it is not surprising that this recovery feels far different from past experiences, Signorino said. The diminished U.S. manufacturing sector no longer provides the quick jump-start to the economy that used to signal that a recession was over. Replacing lost white-collar jobs simply takes longer.
A 'Jobless' or 'No-growth' Recovery?
As the nation approaches the two-year anniversary of the end of the Great Recession, unemployment has been easing but still has a long way to go:
* The national jobless rate has been edging downward, from 10.1 percent in October 2009 -- its highest point -- to 8.8 percent in March.
* Job gains in March were spread across professional and business services, health care, leisure and hospitality and mining, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Employment in manufacturing also continued an upward trend.
* In Missouri, the jobless rate fell to 9.1 percent in March, the lowest since April 2009 -- when it was 9 percent.
* The state added 24,300 new jobs in March, with 13,100 of them in the St. Louis region, according to the Missouri Department of Economic Development.
But economists agree that even though jobs are being added -- 200,000 nationwide in March -- the nation is still just chipping away at replacing the nearly 8 million jobs lost during the recession. About half of last month's increase -- 100,000 -- isn't growth at all but the bare minimum of jobs the economy must add in any given month just to keep up with growth in the labor force.
The recovery is still sending mixed signals: First-time applications for unemployment benefits rose by 27,000 -- to 412,000 -- during the week ending April 9, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That was the biggest increase in two months. But first-time jobless claims decreased by 13,000 in the week ending April 16.
"One thing people who haven't been unemployed for a while need to realize is that when you're out of work now, it can be more frustrating than it's ever been because you're sending out resumes or responding to want ads that are for the most part electronic," Signorino said. "If you were out of work 20 years ago, and you were responding to classified ads in newspapers you were mailing out a few resumes a week. Now you could be emailing 50 to 100 emails a week. Imagine not hearing or being rejected by 50 to 100 companies a week instead of maybe five companies a week. It's really hard."
Signorino worries that the needs of the unemployed are being lost in the politics of the day.
"It is important to continue support for the long-term unemployed until they can get back on their feet," he said. "Don't be cutting unemployment benefits right now. Don't be cutting job training and educational benefits now. It makes no sense because it's people who drive the economy."
Signorino said he sees firsthand the impact of unemployment in his current job as executive director of the Gateway EITC Community Coalition, a nonprofit that does free tax preparation for low- and moderate-income families earning less than $49,000 a year. He said clients this year included families who in the past wouldn't have qualified for his agency's services, but have had their incomes slashed because of job losses.
"When you get your tax refund, what are you doing to do with it?" he said. "Over 65 percent of our families are using that refund to pay for basic living expenses. For bills that have piled up. For electric bills they haven't been able to pay. Medical expenses. Rent. Food and clothing. They're not going on fancy vacations. They're using their refunds to keep their families going."
Signorino warns that political decisions about deficit spending or unemployment benefits shouldn't be made without understanding their impact.
"If you don't know the impact you're going to have on jobs and the economy, you shouldn't be messing with the system until you know what's going to happen," he said. "The American people, for the most part, survive and thrive based on their jobs. They're not sitting around with millions of dollars in the bank and watching interest rates go up and down and the stock market go up and down. They're working."
'I Want an Opportunity'
When Wilson discusses his experiences as a business consultant it's clear that he enjoyed that work -- helping the owners of small- and medium-sized concerns to better manage their books, staffing and marketing. And he believes he could be of help to them in the current economic climate.
"When money gets tight, small businesses, especially those that need the help we were offering, make bad choices. If revenue is down, the last thing they want to cut is the advertising budget, and that's the first thing they cut," he said.
And, as Wilson discovered, they also cut consultants.
He said he finds the discussions about extended unemployment benefits frustrating.
"I would rather be working than sitting on the dole," he said, adding that it is important "to be doing something." But he gets annoyed with people -- and politicians -- "who think that it's easier or we're better off sitting at home collecting unemployment than we would be if we were working."
He said he's working a whole lot harder in his survival job than if he were collecting unemployment, though some might argue that the financial rewards aren't worth the effort.
Wilson said that his wife's job as a paralegal has kept the couple afloat financially and also provides medical benefits.
While he is grateful for her success, he acknowledges that it can be tough on his ego.
"As men, so much of our identity is wrapped up in what we do. Not where we came from or who our family is," he said. "It's how we identify ourselves. 'Oh, Kevin, what do you do?' It doesn't bother me as much that my wife is the primary breadwinner in the family as it might have 20 years ago, but it still bothers me. It's embarrassing."
In the meantime, Wilson keeps up his job search, though he acknowledges that working nights is taking a toll.
"My expectation was that I'd be free to network and interview during the day, but I'm finding myself worn out and less focused," he said.
If he could send a message to the nation's lawmakers and policymakers, he would urge them to support small business. He believes that the owners of small and medium-sized business hold the key to the nation's economic future now that big business has globalized.
"I don't want a handout. I want an opportunity," he said. "I want a level playing field, and I don't feel like we have one right now. It's a product of the economy. It's a product of the politics going on in Washington right now. Because a banker who gets a million dollar bonus, gets his company bailed out when he runs it into the ground, but the small business owner who might hire me is going under."
