Unemployment in USA

Even as the great recession of 2008 has just started petering out, the issue of unemployment (about 15 millions) is still dodging the US economy with Obama administration trying its best to get back the majority of unemployed into jobs. The condtion of labor market needs to be studied in a broader perspective and not in terms of smaller palliatives to solve it as one time measure.

An interesting feature of the emerging scenario is the change in the nature of job-qualification or experience of the work force as the recovery in manufacturing demands. The industry now requires the services of skilled workers and not the type employed earlier in pre-recession days. It is ipso facto an opportunity available to the managements to procure the really-needed and eligible employees to handle the high-end and sophisticated machines that are replacing the old and obsolete equipments day by day.Such a development is revealed best in a survey conducted last year of 779 industrial companies by the National Associations of Manufacturers, the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, the accounting and consuting firm in which 32 percent of companies reported "moderate to serious" skills shortages and sixty three percent of life science companies and 45 percent of energy firms cited such shortages(The New York Times of July 2,2010).

Now the US economy and the administration needs to train and upgrade the skills of the already unemployed and the incremental additions entering the labor market every year. Nothing less than a National Training Package by the Federal government and implementation at the state level for a period of 4 - 5 years can retrieve the situation in the short or long term. A perfect and thorough study of the possibility of job-generartion in all the three sectors - primary, secondary and tertiary,alone can indicate the scope and preparations needed for such a goal.

Let us see how Obama administration makes moves in this direction.