Tens of thousands more layoffs are announced

It's already been a lousy year for workers less than a month into 2009 and there's no relief in sight. Tens of thousands of fresh layoffs were announced Monday and more companies are expected to cut payrolls in the months ahead.

A new survey by the National Association for Business Economics depicts the worst business conditions in the U.S. since the report's inception in 1982.

Thirty-nine percent of NABE's forecasters predicted job reductions through attrition or "significant" layoffs over the next six months, up from 32 percent in the previous survey in October. Around 45 percent in the current survey anticipated no change in hiring plans, while roughly 17 percent thought hiring would increase.

The recession, which started in December 2007, and is expected to stretch into this year, has been a job killer. The economy lost 2.6 million jobs last year, the most since 1945. The unemployment rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, the highest in 16 years, and is expected to keep climbing.

"Job losses accelerated in the fourth quarter, and the employment outlook for the next six months has weakened further," said Sara Johnson, NABE's lead analyst on the survey and an economist at IHS Global Insight.

Thousands more jobs cuts were announced Monday. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., which is buying rival drugmaker Wyeth in a $68 billion deal, and Sprint Nextel Corp., the country's third-largest wireless provider, said they each will slash 8,000 jobs. Home Depot Inc., the biggest home improvement retailer in the U.S., will get rid of 7,000 jobs, and General Motors Corp. said it will cut 2,000 jobs at plants in Michigan and Ohio due to slow sales.

Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest maker of mining and construction equipment, announced 5,000 new layoffs on top of several earlier actions. The latest cuts of support and management employees will be made globally by the end of March. An additional 2,500 workers already have accepted buyout offers, and ties have been severed with about 8,000 contract workers worldwide. In addition, about 4,000 full-time factory workers already have been let go.

Just last week, Microsoft Corp. said it will slash up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months. Intel Corp. said it will cut up to 6,000 manufacturing jobs and United Airlines parent UAL Corp. said it would get rid of 1,000 jobs, on top of 1,500 axed late last year.

The NABE survey of 105 forecasters was taken Dec. 17 through Jan. 8.

Also in the survey, 52 percent said they expected gross domestic product to fall by more than 1 percent this year. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced within the U.S. and is the best barometer of the country's economic fitness. The last time GDP fell for a full year was in 1991, a tiny 0.2 percent dip. The economy shrank by 1.9 percent in 1982, when the country was suffering through a severe recession.

Forecasters have grown more pessimistic about the outlook. In the October survey, no forecaster thought GDP would fall by more than 1 percent.

In terms of business conditions, more reported customer demand dropping, capital spending reductions and shrinking profit margins.

Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar also reported Monday that its fourth-quarter profit plunged 32 percent. The company expects sharply lower results this year as global economic problems cut into its business.

Altogether the NABE report "depicts the worst business conditions since the survey began in 1982, confirming that the U.S. recession deepened in the fourth quarter of 2008," Johnson said.

Many analysts predict the economy will have contracted at a pace of 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter when the government releases that report on Friday. If they are correct, that would mark the worst performance since a 6.4 percent drop in the first quarter of 1982. The economy is still contracting now — at a pace of around 4 percent, according to some projections.

Economic crisis hitting men harder than women

The economic crisis is hitting men much harder than women in the workplace, largely because male-dominated industries like construction and transportation are bearing the brunt of job losses, figures show.

Women, meanwhile, dominate sectors that are still growing, like government and healthcare, experts said.

"It's men that have taken the hit," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. "It's been an overwhelmingly male phenomena."

Four-fifths of the 2.74 million people who lost their jobs between November 2007 and November 2008 were men, Sum said.

The biggest losses came in construction, where men comprise 87 percent of the work force, he said. Large losses also came in manufacturing and wholesale trade, where men make up more than two-thirds of the work force, he said.

"Males were dominant in sectors that were taking a bad hit," he said. "It's men and the blue-collar jobs. It's overwhelming."

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, men's employment as a ratio of the population dropped by 2.7 percent, while the ratio among women's dropped 0.8 percent from December 2007 to December 2008. The unemployment rate among men rose to 7.9 percent from 5.0, while among women, it rose to 6.4 percent from 4.8 percent, the agency said.

The gap between men's and women's unemployment is the highest since 1983, said Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress.

"The recession started with the collapse of the housing bubble," Boushey said. "Clearly we've seen significant layoffs in the construction industry and other sectors, and that really has been driving this problem."

Meanwhile, women are strongly represented in sectors that are still growing, experts noted.

Health and education sectors -- where three-quarters of workers are women -- added 536,000 jobs, Sum said.

Women office workers, like receptionists and clerical workers, have suffered losses. The sector, more than 70 percent female, has lost about 800,000 jobs, Sum said.

Women accounted for 102,000 of the 134,000 lost in the financial sector, Boushey said. But job loss in that industry has been relatively small, compared to manufacturing jobs, she said.

Women may see more job losses ahead in the financial sector, where they hold about 59 percent of jobs, Sum said.

"They're just beginning to lay off," he said. "I expect to see more business-related losses in the months ahead."

States with highest unemployment rates share root causes

Unlike the last recession, today's unemployment hot spots are all over the map.

The five states with the highest unemployment rates -- Michigan, Rhode Island, South Carolina, California and Oregon -- all have something in common, though: a heightened exposure to the root causes of this downward spiral.

The collapse of housing. The implosion of the auto industry. The meltdown of financial services. The exodus of manufacturing.

All states are feeling the pain, but the worst are getting hammered on multiple fronts:

-- The rotten housing market has punished California lenders and builders, taken an ax to Oregon's timber industry and soured the prospects for construction workers in Rhode Island, where buyers from neighboring states helped drive up home prices.

-- The steady decline of the manufacturing sector has punished Rhode Island and South Carolina, where laid-off factory workers lack the training and job opportunities in an increasingly high-tech economy.

-- The auto industry's pain is Michigan's above all. But it is also being felt in states like South Carolina, where German automaker BMW has cut 500 temporary workers, and in California, where many of dealerships have shut down.

"What makes this a different recession," said Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution, "is that it is so widespread."

During the 2001 recession, which was largely tied to the dot-com collapse, the West had a disproportionate amount of the jobless burden: Oregon, Washington, Alaska and California had the highest unemployment rates. (Mississippi and Washington, D.C. were tied with California.)

There is one region of the country that has largely avoided the country's real estate and manufacturing woes, and as a result has been spared the worst of the recession's pain.

A contiguous cluster of rural states -- Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah -- had the lowest unemployment rates in November, ranging from 3.2 percent to 3.7 percent. The Labor Department on Friday said the national jobless rate in December was 7.2 percent.

Historically high prices for energy and grains have been a boon to their economies, although recent declines in commodity prices are beginning to bite, economists said.

For the majority of the country, the air has come out of a decade-long housing bubble, with home prices falling an average of 20 percent in the past year and almost one in ten mortgages either overdue or in foreclosure. A wide swath of industries is feeling the pain, including real estate agents, bankers, builders, lumber companies and furniture makers.

The real estate bust is at the heart of mounting job losses in California, which has seen its unemployment rate reach 8.4 percent, the third-highest in the nation. In the year ending in November, 71 percent of the nonfarm jobs lost in California were housing-related.

Many of the nation's leading mortgage lenders -- Countrywide Financial, New Century Financial, IndyMac Bancorp, and Fremont General Corp. -- were based in California and have since been bought by larger banks or gone bankrupt.

The recently unemployed in California include Filemon Galvan, 41, of Buena Park, Calif., who was laid off from his job as a carpenter for a housing subcontractor in August.

"It's been a long time since we had a nice family outing," Galvan said in Spanish.

As the country's leading lumber producer, Oregon has also taken a direct hit from housing, with sawmills producing sharply less than a year ago. The slump has cost Oregon about 1,000 logging jobs in the past two years and more than 7,000 jobs in wood manufacturing, which includes plywood mills and the production of door and window frames, said David Cooke, an economist in Oregon's employment department.

Not even tiny Rhode Island, which has the nation's second-highest unemployment rate at 9.3 percent, has been exempt from the housing bust.

The slide has cost Rhode Island more than 3,000 construction jobs in the past year, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Due to a combination of high energy prices, a strong dollar and competition from overseas, manufacturers have been manhandled for most of this decade -- and ground zero for the loss of factory jobs is Michigan. Its crumbling auto industry explains a large part of the state's nation-leading unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. Around the state, and across the country, the state's automakers have had to close plants and showrooms, cut back workers' hours and reduce wages as consumers' appetite for new cars dwindles along with their job security.

But the manufacturing slowdown has gone far beyond the industrial Midwest. South Carolina's jobless rate has reached 8.4 percent, the third-highest, as it struggles to replace lost textile and apparel manufacturing jobs with the type of high-tech industries that North Carolina has been able to attract.

And Rhode Island, not generally known as a manufacturing hub, has suffered. The industrial conglomerate Textron Inc., which is based in Providence and makes Cessna jets and Bell helicopters, laid off 2,200 of its 43,000 workers last year.

Most of the state's manufacturers are small, however, and have had a tough time weathering the credit crunch.

Lincoln, R.I. resident Larry Miller believed he would retire from the auto parts manufacturer where he first got a job as a newly married 26-year-old. That was two factory closings ago, the most recent being a plant owned by KIK Custom Products, which also had employed his wife.

"The word loyalty is gone," said Miller, shaking his head while sitting at his kitchen table. He found a new job in Massachusetts, but his wife is still looking.

Like South Carolina, the state hasn't yet made a successful transformation from manufacturing to newer-economy industries such as biotech or computing.

"I would summarize Rhode Island's economy as information age, hold the information," said Leonard Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island.