A crushing wait: Recession wears on for local jobhunters

More than 19 months after the nation’s recession officially ended, a near record 28,675 Colorado Springs residents remain out of work and, if national trends hold true here, many of them have been out of work for a long time.

Although the federal government counts unemployment in weeks, many area residents have been without jobs for months, and in a growing number of cases, years. Soon they will be eligible for another six weeks of unemployment benefits; Colorado became the 33rd state to qualify for extended payments of up to 99 weeks as a result of the state’s surging jobless rate. In December, at 8.8 percent, it matched the highest rate since the mid-1970s.

For those who have been without a job for months, finding work has been anything but easy. Applicants tell of sending hundreds of job applications and never getting a response, much less an interview. The recession has washed away millions of jobs, and employers have proven reluctant to hire back workers amid a sluggish and uneven recovery.

Some unemployed workers may never again find the type of work they had before they lost their job. Entire industries have moved overseas or have replaced employees with technology, leaving laid-off workers to find new careers. And that doesn’t even count those who have stopped looking for work or taken part-time jobs because no full-time work was available — add them, and the area and state jobless rate would be above 15 percent.

National data show that a growing percentage of the jobless ranks is staying out of work longer, with nearly half of those looking for jobs in December reporting they had been out of work for more than six months. Little state and no area data are available, but the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment estimates about 20,000 unemployed residents already are eligible for the additional six weeks of unemployment benefits.

The biggest stumbling block to finding work is that few employers are hiring. Job growth has been slow to resume at the national and state level, and has yet to happen in the Springs area, where employment has declined for 33 consecutive months. Tom Binnings, a partner in local economic research firm Summit Economics LLC, believes the local economy may start generating jobs in the first half of the year, but it will take years to replace the 18,000 jobs lost in the recession.

“The most distressing fact is that the local economy is losing jobs in areas where gains had been forecast, such as health care and business services, industries that had been growing in the past several years,” Binnings said. “The long-term unemployed may be stuck there. If you look at the data about who they are, it is lower skilled workers. If you then look at where the job opportunities are, they are in the technology realm. There is a mismatch between the jobs and the unemployed.”

Older workers, especially those over 55, have remained out of work longer and a majority of those without jobs, regardless of how long they have been unemployed, have a high-school education or less, according to an October study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Chronically unemployed individuals typically do repetitive-task work like manufacturing that didn’t require an advanced degree and paid a middle-class wage,” said Fred Crowley, senior economist for the Southern Colorado Economic Forum. “Those jobs are mostly gone now. A lot of call centers and Web development work also has been shipped offshore and business-to-business sales are now done over the Web. The people that had those jobs are chronically unemployed.”

Many manufacturing jobs have shifted to overseas locations as a result of lower labor costs, while jobs in the construction industry may be years from returning until the supply of foreclosed real estate is significantly reduced, said Mike Kazmierski, president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Regional Economic Development Corp.

“This recovery is unlike every other since World War II. The job market bounced back quickly in all of the others, but we are still seeing little job growth despite some signs of recovery in the economy,” Kazmierski said. “Those people who are waiting for things to go back to where they were will have a very long wait.”

Dana Rodenbaugh, vice president of the Pikes Peak Workforce Center, said he sees plenty of workers who have lost good-paying jobs remain out of work for two years or more. In many cases, the laid-off worker can hold out for their “A-list preferred job,” he said, because he or she is living with a spouse or dependent who has a job. They don’t want to take a lower-paying job because it will require them to adjust their lifestyle and standard of living, he said.

“They resist the temptation of taking any job. Usually, it is a matter of how thorough a job search they are doing,” Rodenbaugh said. “But I also run into people who can’t get a job because they are well above the requirements of the position. Employers believe that they will take the job as a stopgap and continue actively looking for a better job. They fear that the new hire will get bored, will be too expensive, leave as soon as they find a better job or be their boss in 10 months.”