WCBS 880 Special Series: Where The Jobs Are – Part 5 - Who's In Luck And Who's Stuck?
With the economy struggling to rebound and the unemployment rate having just spiked up to 8.2 percent, WCBS 880's news anchor Wayne Cabot other members of the Newsradio 880 team produced a weeklong special series of reports, culminating here, called Where The Jobs Are. The series was supervised by WCBS 880's Rivka Oppenheim.
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - The middle class is always getting stuck. Now it's jobs, reported WCBS 880's Wayne Cabot.
WCBS 880's Wayne Cabot With The Story
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Opportunities for those in the middle have been shrinking, while low and high skilled jobs have been growing.
The New York Federal Reserve has reported a major rise in wage inequality and job polarization since 1980, when Ronald Reagan became President and Bill Clinton was waiting in the wings.
Clinton told CBS News on Wednesday that he doesn't see a change for years, until things settle out in Europe, believe it or not.
"It's sort of like a cloud in the background that's holding us back," he said.
Job placement experts agree with him.
"Until we get a little bit more peace out in the European markets, things are going to stay very stagnant, if not worse," Cynthia Demato, Managing Partner at Elite Placement in Stamford, told WCBS 880's Paul Murnane.
So to get work, people, just like companies, need to retool.
"When the market was great, people were willing to take good people, train them and get them over the hump. But these days, they want somebody to come in and hit the ground running," she said.
She told Murnane that experience and skill are not always enough.
"It's kind of very sad. I mean, I speak with people on a day-to-day basis with excellent skillsets, really very placeable, good backgrounds, that are really just finding difficulty finding work," she said.
She said accounting and financial jobs are pretty strong, but not at banks or hedge funds.
"Surprisingly enough, manufacturing especially, the industry that's been hurt the most and has slowed down in this area in particular because everybody's going down south has really picked up," she said.
But these aren't your old "Laverne & Shirley" assembly line jobs. These require knowledge of accounting and government compliance.
That's a lot of responsibility, and the bosses know it.
More than one out of four CFOs surveyed this week said their employees are maxed out, reported Cabot. So, they've decided to start hiring again.
To close out this special series, we'll leave you with a comment from Jim Barrett, who, following his being laid off after decades with AT&T, is jazzed about his Got Junk franchise.
"There's plenty of jobs. Just look for them. Try hard. Impress somebody. Show up like you want to have a job, you're looking for a job, you want that job. Do some research before you go in there and look the part," he said. "Mirror their customer."
Barrett himself is hiring.
Do you know of any job openings? Share them in the comments section below.
