Workers See Power Shifting to Employers

Labor: The economic slowdown has given companies the edge in the job market.

By LISA GIRION TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles Times September 3, 2001

With the economy shedding more jobs than it added in recent months and unemployment rolls at a nine-year high, American workers have plenty to worry about this Labor Day.

The people waiting in employment offices to search job data banks and talk to career counselors are signs of the increasing pain caused by the economic slowdown.

Mounting corporate cutbacks helped to boost the number of Americans on unemployment to 3.17 million in August, the most since September 1992, and that number doesn't include those who are looking for more work or better jobs. The new legions of unemployed are reinforcing the new balance of power between companies and job seekers.

Employers, who last Labor Day were griping about paying dearly to fill jobs with any warin body, now are taking their time choosing candidates, and they are calling the shots in pay negotiations.

As one corporate recruiter put it in response to a recent labor market survey, "Companies are back in the driver's seat."

Workers, many of whom had their choice ofjobs a year ago, are reeling from the pink slips and feeling about as disposable as empty water-cooler bottles. Job hunts are lasting longer, and many people are taking what they can get, settling for less pay, less work--or both.

"If s scary out there, job-wise," said Larry Brooks, an administrative assistant who has been temping--increasingly iffegularly--since the Los Angeles production company he was with folded.

"Bush and the government may say there's no recession. But if you are at the opposite end of the spectrum--down looking up--its a recession," he said. "Companies are laying people off, and there is very little work."

Many companies are holding positions open to see which way the economy is headed. Hiring plans for the end of the year are down sharply in most sectors, with the manufacturing and service industries expecting to be staffing at or near levels of the last recession, according to a closely watched survey of 16,000 companies released last week by Manpower Inc., a Milwaukee-based staf1mg firm.

Last September, with unemployment at a 30-year low, recruiters were losing candidates they didrft sign within 48 hours of interviews, and some companies resorted to "labor hoarding," hiring people even before they had job openings. Now companies can take their time.

"We are seeing our clients willing to invest now in fuller assessments and in-depth interviews," said Rich Wellins, senior vice president of global marketing for Development Dimensions International, a Pittsburgh-based human resources consulting firm.

Job Candidate Not Being Picky

Joe Kaiser has been surfing Internet job sites, tying not to get caught in the economy's undertow, for six weeks. The unemployed manufacturing manager has spent three hours a day, Monday through Friday, at a computer terminal at the Verdugo Job Center, a state-run employment agency in Glendale.

And he isn't being picky. Although Kaiser has 25 years' experience managing injection mold-making shops, he also is qualified and willing to work as a tool-and-die maker.

"I have all my tools. I can work as a skilled craftsperson. I can do sales. I can manage," he said. "I've sent my resume all around. They all say, 'It looks like you know what you are doing. But we just don't have anything for you right now.'"

With manufacturing suffering the biggest job losses, Kaiser said he has created three versions of his resume, emphasizing different aspects of his experience.

Kaiser doesn't want to apply for lower-skilled machinistjobs, which he said pay $9 to $10 an hour, a third of what experienced die-makers were getting in Kaiser's home state of Wisconsin when he left a year ago.

Brooks, the administrative assistant, also is struggling to maintain his earnings in the wake of a hiring slowdown at Los Angeles studios that was precipitated, in part, by the stockpiling of movies and TV shows in preparation for possible strikes by actors and writers. The strikes were averted.

"As we got closer to the strike time, when the contracts were up for renewal, all the studios began cutting back on the amount of temps they were using, and there were hiring freezes across the board," he said. "So no one could get anything."

Brooks said he has looked outside the entertainment industry with equally poor results. Prospects for temps are so bad, he said, that typically competitive agencies are encouraging workers to sign up with rivals to increase their chances of landing jobs.

"The temp field has just collapsed," Brooks said. "I'm signed with eight different agencies, and there are some weeks I'm lucky to have work. Some weeks I only have one day of work."

Brooks, whose skills include typing 70 words a minute, said he wants a permanent, full-time job, preferably in a movie studio marketing department, and he wants the $14 to $15 an hour he once earned.

"But I've been going as low as $ 10" lately for temp jobs, he said. "If s really scary. "

Although it may appear grim to job seekers, the current employment picture is not bad by historical standards.

"The [nation's] unemployment rate has gone up to 4.5% from 3.9% a year ago, but it is still at 30-year lows," said Michael S. Bernick, director of the California Employment Development Department.

"We still have almost 200,000 jobs listed on CalJobs [the state's Internet employment board], and in L.A. County alone, we have 54,304 jobs," Bernick said. "So there are jobs out there. Employers are hiring. Ifs not at the frenzied pace of a year or a year and a half ago."

Another sign of the relative strength in the job market is the duration of unemployment, according to a report released last week by the Employment Policy Foundation. The typical pink-slip victim can expect to find a new job within seven weeks. That' s about a week longer than the median term of unemployment a year ago but less than the median of 9.5 weeks during the worst part of the recession of the early 1990s.

"It's a big economy," said Ron Bird, chief economist at EPF, a business-backed think tank based in Washington. "The important thing that I think is going on in this economic slowdown, unlike earlier slowdowns, is the reemployment rate is very high."

Still, finding the right job, at a good wage, is increasingly difficult, job seekers said.

"I didn't expect it to be this hard for me to find a job," said Sandra Clodfelter of Canoga Park, who is looking for an administrative assistant position. "There's a lot ofjobs out there. I'm My qualified. I have theskills. But its taken me three weeks to get my first interview."

Clodfelter spent Friday morning updating her resume and printing it on heavyweight, gray paper in preparation for an interview with an advertising agency. She has been unemployed since ajob she started July I was eliminated, along with the entire department, two weeks later. When Clodfelter went back to the commercial real estate firm where she had worked as a leasing assistant for four years, she found her old job had been filled.

"A lot of people who want to work aren't working," said Paula Parke, who has been unemployed and living with her 15-year-old daughter in a homeless shelter since June.

Parke graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelors degree in English in 1991 --"a very difficult year for jobs." She spent a year as a Vista volunteer and has worked as a substitute teacher, a home health aide, ajob coach for people with developmental disabilities, and, most recently, an administrative assistant.

She hopes to find a permanent job that pays enough to support her and her daughter.

"Ifs as important to make enough money as it is to work," Parke said. Otherwise, "what happens is you get into a cycle of low-paying jobs and of changing jobs, which, in the long run, doesn't help."

Wage erosion is a real threat in the current job market, said Edith Rasell, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed research organization in Washington.

"People, when they are laid off, are finding jobs without waiting huge lengths of time, but we don't know what the wages are," Rasell said. "We know from past experience that the job they get is often 10% lower, or more, than the job they had."

'Difficult Period' in Entertainment Sector

With a UCLA film degree and years of experience in computer engineering, broadcast engineering and working behind the scenes on television shows, including "The Nanny," Sal Ortiz has been the object of salary "bidding wars." But for the last year, the Burbank resident has been unable to get a permanent, full-time position.

Instead, feeling the effect of a slowdown in entertainment hiring, Ortiz has strung together a series of short-term jobs, collecting his final paycheck from his latest stint at Fox Sports Network on Friday.

"If s a very difficult period, especially in entertainment," he said.

Like others, Ortiz has had to settle for jobs that do not utilize his skills and that pay as much as a third less than his previous positions. To maximize his options, he has put together four resumes, the preferred one focusing on his prime-time television production experience.

Burbank and Glendale have been hit particularly hard by entertainment industry layoffs, said Don Nakamoto, a city of Glendale labor market specialist.

Disney's March announcement that it would cut 4,000 jobs nationwide was among the biggest. But its full effect was not felt right away. After buyouts and attrition, the company handed out about 1,000 pink slips in June and July.

"I'm seeing a larger volume of people," Nakamoto said. "Companies were making large layoff announcements earlier in the year, and now they are starting to come through. When they announced them, they didn't all happen at once."