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Tech Employment Drops Sharply In 2004
Cryofan writes "According to Information Week, the lastest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that
the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000 in the last 3 years, and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004.
According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
A Colossus With Weak Knees
By Paul Craig Roberts
If George Bush and John Kerry were aware of the problems that await the next president, they would be vying to throw the election, not to win it.
Job loss at home and failure abroad have already written the script which will sweep away the next administration.
Recession could return by the inauguration before the economy ever regains the jobs lost to the 2001 recession. Second quarter 2004 economic growth came in 20% less than expected. The consumer is showing weakness, and crude oil prices have reached record highs. Personal savings remain low by historical standards.
On August 3 the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that seasonally adjusted real per capita incomes declined in June to levels below those reached in April. Total personal real spending declined 0.9% in June to the level of last February.
As the Bureau of Labor Statistics made clear in its July 30 report, the US economy is suffering not only from weak job growth but also from a loss of better paying jobs.
Only 65% of the 5.3 million workers who were laid off from long term jobs during the first three years of President Bush's administration were reemployed by January 2004. That means only about 3.5 million of the 5.3 million laid off workers were able to find new jobs during two years of economic recovery.
Of those who found new jobs, 57%--about 2 million workers--took jobs paying less than their previous positions. About 1.2 million of the workers who found new jobs experienced pay cuts of 20% or more.
It is really disturbing that this job loss may have occurred in the absence of a recession. The conventional definition of recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. However, on July 30 the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the revised GDP data for 2001, and the recession, as conventionally measured, has disappeared. The revised data does not show two consecutive negative quarters, and for 2001 the economy grew 0.8%. Did we experience not only a job loss recovery, but also a job loss nonrecession?
There was no recession in the second quarter of this year, but BLS data show 131,000 fewer American computer software engineers employed in the second quarter than in the first quarter of 2004--a decline of 15% in three months. Employment of computer scientists and systems analysts declined by 51,000 in the second quarter. Employment of computer programmers fell 16,000.
Despite the horrendous job loss, the unemployment rates for software engineers, computer scientists and programmers fell, which suggests that technical professionals are discouraged and have ceased to search for jobs in their occupations.
The decline in high-tech professions in the US is also reflected in the collapse in computer engineering enrollments in America's premier engineering schools. Over the past several years, M.I.T., Georgia Tech, and UC Berkeley have experienced computer engineering enrollment declines of 43%.
More unprecedented bad news comes from the Internal Revenue Service. For the first time ever, the real incomes of Americans shrank for two consecutive years. In 2002 Americans repor
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