The US economy has lost seven million jobs since 2007 and remains in the grip of a weak and largely jobless recovery that could take five more years to restore prerecession levels of employment, McKinsey research indicates.
In this video, two experts examine the jobs issue from two different vantage points. Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services, a global staffing company that manages external workforces for corporations around the world, describes fundamental changes that have occurred in the nature of work. In response to globalization and fast-changing technology, entire categories of jobs can now disappear with breathtaking rapidity. That has led to a big expansion worldwide in the number of people who work under new forms of employment: part-time, temporary, contract, even fractional workers who put in their hours where and when they can. But while the US workplace has changed, Camden argues that tax and benefit policies have failed to keep up.
Michael Spence, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics and author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2011), sees structural changes in the economy that present major challenges to job creation. A loss of middle-class jobs in the tradable sector—mostly manufacturing—was offset largely by jobs in the non-tradable or service sector during the housing bubble, thanks to debt-fueled consumer spending. When that binge ended, many of those service jobs disappeared as well. Filling the void will be neither easy nor quick.
The US employment challenge: Perspectives from Carl Camden and Michael Spence