This article gets into which jobs have been lost due to the Coronavirus by sector, and not surprisingly the Leisure and Hospitality sector leads the way. It’s hard to imagine these types of jobs coming back soon as many people will be afraid to travel and congregate until a vaccine is available.
The other challenge will be slower economic activity in general. Jobs tied to consumer spending will have trouble rebounding if the overall economy is still in recession.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell threw some cold water on the notion of a quick snap-back for the economy and job markets in the wake of the Coronavirus. He argued that policymakers may have to use additional weapons to pull the country out of a crisis that has cost at least 20 million jobs and caused “a level of pain that is hard to capture in words.”
This doesn’t bode well for many sectors like travel and dining and will make it very difficult for jobs to come back quickly.
AOL cut 20 percent of its workforce today, eliminating 950 jobs in the U.S. and India. Last year, the company cut 2,300 employees during its first round of layoffs. This year’s round of layoffs was aimed at trimming the budget, getting rid of positions that no longer serve a purpose, and eliminating jobs that overlapped with the Huffington Post website, which AOL acquired just days ago. None of the 250 Huffington Post employees that joined AOL lost their jobs. Instead, 200 employees who work for AOL’s media and technology groups lost their jobs, and 750 employees in India.
In the U.S., AOL laid off reporters and editors who worked for its travel site and business, personal finance sites Daily Finance and Wallet Pop. It also cut across its news and politics sites, including Politics Daily, according to people familiar with the matter. Employees who were laid off started packing up their belongings on Thursday, a person familiar with the matter said.
The operations in India are in part a vestige of AOL’s old business as an Internet service provider, starting with call center outsourcing into 2002 and later changing into a business operations center. Recently, the group focused more on tech and financial support as well as functions such as advertising operations.
Although AOL acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million, the company is still on shaky ground. According to WSJ, AOL shares are trading at their lowest levels since the company split off from Time Warner Inc. in December 2009. Shares of AOL were off 34 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $19 in Thursday 4 p.m. composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And according to research firm eMarketer Inc., AOL’s ad revenues dropped 26 percent in 2010, while the overall online ad market grew around 14 percent. AOL has steadily lost market share to rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said he expects AOL’s online advertising business to start growing again during the second half of the year.
“AOL remains in the middle of the disruption that the Internet is causing and we are starting to move from being a disrupted brand to a brand that is leading the disruption,” Mr. Armstrong said in his memo. “The changes we are making are not easy, but they are the right changes for the long-term health of the company, the brand, and for our employees.”
After all is said and done, AOL will employ about 4,000 people. This figure does not include staff that currently work for AOL’s local Patch news sites, which recently hired 1,200 new employees.
Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, promotes jobs for lower-wage workers. She, along with worker advocates, claims that employers are screening out job applicants who are unemployed.
Owens said a telephone company in Atlanta, which she didn’t identify, ran an help-wanted ad saying only the employed should apply. Jobless applicants were also turned down by a temporary staffing firm and a Texas recruiter because they were unemployed, she said.
“What’s startling are the lengths to which companies are going to communicate this such as including the phrase ‘unemployed candidates will not be considered’ right in the posting,” she said.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is investigating similar claims after media reports revealed that some employers are keeping applicants without jobs from being considered. The practice has also raised concerns about discrimination. Still, many others feel that the practice just doesn’t exist.
The Society for Human Resource Management, which represents more than 250,000 personnel managers, is “unaware of widespread recruiting practices” that exclude the jobless, said Fernan R. Cepero, representing the Alexandria, Virginia-based group.
Applicants who have been out of work may struggle because their skills are more obsolete than those who are employed, said Cepero, vice president for human resources at the YMCA of Greater Rochester in New York.
If you feel you have been discriminated against by an employer, contact the EEOC at 1.800.669.4000 or email info@eeoc.gov.
You may have noticed that there are fewer people working at reception desks, in administrative positions, at checkout counters, and in factories, and more computers are popping up in their place. Self-service check-out, and computers and robots that can do everything from sort mail to assemble a car, have all but eliminated millions of jobs around the world—and the trend is expected to continue.
A whopping 300,000 administrative jobs alone disappeared between 2004-2009 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it projects “continued contraction throughout the next decade.” File clerk positions are expected to decline 23 percent, and according to a recent Forbes article, technology has put postal service mail sorters on the chopping block as well. After losing nearly 57,000 jobs between 2004 and 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects a further 30 percent decline in this occupation by 2018.
“The kinds of jobs that are disappearing are the jobs that pay really well (for) relatively unskilled workers,” says Harry Holzer, Ph.D., Georgetown University economist and co-author of “Where Are All The Good Jobs Going.” He lists manufacturing jobs as a leading example, saying that well-paid assembly jobs that require modest training and only a high school diploma or less are a thing of the past.
So where did all the good jobs go? “The combination of technological advancement and off-shoring has shrunk these jobs,” says Holzer.
The following list represents only a few of the world’s dying occupations. Many more are expected to kick the bucket in the coming years.
-Computer Operators: declined by 31% from 2004-2009
