December 4, 2010
BOONDOGGLES WILL COME BACK FOR THE WORST OF ALL REASONS...:
Why employers won't hire (Chris Isidore, December 3, 2010, CNNMoney.com)
Businesses were forced to figure how to be more productive and change the way they did business, in order to survive during the recession, said Tig Gilliam, president of the North American unit of Adecco, the world's largest job placement firm. And that isn't going away anytime soon, he said."It's not just getting people to do more," he said. "I think companies have stopped doing things. They've said 'It was a nice to have those extra 23 reports we used to do every week, but we don't have the people to do them.' That's not going to change."
That's a key reason the job market has remained stuck in the mud. While gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, has recovered 84% of the output that was lost during the recession, but the labor market has recouped only 11% of the jobs that were lost.
"We're producing almost as much as we did before the recession, with 7.5 million less people," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute. "The difference is going into the productivity numbers and corporate profits."
The latest reading on productivity, which measures the economic output of each hour Americans work during a quarter, was up 2.5% from a year ago in the third quarter, the Labor Department reported this week. It's the sixth straight quarter of gains of that level or higher.
...because managers perceive power in a bigger group of people under their control.
