According to a recently released poll, 32 percent of Americans are crazy. At least, that's how I read the data. What the poll, conducted by Associated Press-GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, found is that an astonishing 32 percent of those surveyed are confident that they are secure in their jobs.
How can anyone today feel safe? Many industries - automobile manufacturing, media, the retail sector, financial services and construction, to name a few - are in free-fall. And now even technology giants such as National Semiconductor and Dell have begun laying people off. So has Microsoft, which recently announced the first major layoff in the company's history.
And it all trickles down. As computer programmers cut back on lattes, Starbucks workers lose their jobs. And as taxes shrink, governments contract, which means that tiny branches of local libraries are laying off people too.
The official U.S. unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, and the actual rate is probably closer to 14 percent if you include people so discouraged that they've quit looking or taken part-time jobs because that's all they could find. Surveys have found that most Americans have friends or family members who have been laid off in the last six months.
In the global marketplace, mass firings have become the knee-jerk reaction to whatever bad news comes along. As defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a mass layoff occurs when at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance are filed by the former employees of a single establishment during a five-week period. In December there were, by those standards, 2,275 mass layoff "events" nationwide, down slightly from November's record of 2,333. As a point of comparison, there were "just" 1,352 mass layoffs in November 2007.
The bureau also reports on what it calls "extended" mass layoffs, which is what happens when private-sector nonfarm employers report that 50 or more employees have remained out of work for at least 31 days. During the fourth quarter of 2008, 3,140 extended mass layoffs left 508,859 people "separated" from their jobs. The construction and manufacturing sectors hit highs for extended mass layoffs.
I run a Web site, EconoWhiner.com, where people share their experiences, strategies and emotions in this time of economic downturn. One correspondent posted the story of a recent day: "I called a contact at one of our client's offices, only to be told that she had been laid off last week." Then, "I headed into a meeting with another client and right before that meeting began, they called one of my colleagues, my best friend at the office, into a side meeting where they fired him - part of a large bank layoff. ... I felt that the Depression had hit."
