Looking for work but can’t find it? Here’s why

These are definitely not boom times.

“The bottom has clearly fallen out of the labor market,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “The biggest change is that firms are simply not hiring.”

As the economy chilled through the fall, the balance between job-seekers and openings has been steadily shifting against the worker, according to a monthly government report released Tuesday known as the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

JOLTS, as it is called, shows a plunge in hiring for leisure and hospitality jobs, Baker said. “Hiring is also just grinding to a halt in construction and manufacturing.”

The report adds detail to Friday’s dismal data that showed the economy shedding 524,000 jobs in December and 2.6 million jobs during the entire year.

JOLTS helps fill in the picture by measuring how many people were hired, laid off and quit, while also counting the number of openings — which points toward future hiring.

“The release confirms the dire labor market situation,” wrote economist Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director of Moody’s Economy.com, in an online posting. “Hiring has plummeted and, more importantly, based on available job openings, the near-term outlook will not bring about any improvement.”

Nationally, job-seekers outnumber openings about four to one, according to economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. “It is easy to understand why nearly a quarter of unemployed workers have been out of a job for over six months.”

The job market is challenging, even for experienced employees. For those with less experience or fewer skills, it can be a nightmare.

Leah Edwards, 22, has worked a bit in retail, in offices and marketing research. Hoping for a career in fashion, she came to Atlanta to attend American InterContinental University.

While a student, she was laid off from a retail job and couldn’t pay her other bills. She got her associate degree, but lost her car and apartment.

At the holidays, she was hired by a large retailer as a $9-an-hour seasonal worker. But business was so slow that they were trimming hours and seasonal workers didn’t get any at all.

Now, the need for a paycheck is urgent, she said. “I have been looking for a job and it is just not happening. Anything beats a blank. I need to get up on my feet and start over.”

Starting over is harder when positions aren’t opening up because of turnover. One sign of a tough economy is the number of people clinging to their jobs.

According to JOLTS, roughly 1.87 million people in November quit their jobs, down 12 percent from the previous month and down 20 percent from six months before.

The pace of monthly hiring peaked at about 5 million two years ago, but the six-year period of expansion that preceded this recession — November 2001 to December 2007 — was the weakest since World War II.

Economists have struggled to explain why job growth was so modest.

Among the reasons offered was the ease of sending work overseas. In manufacturing especially, but increasingly in service and technology, U.S. companies were hiring contractors from Ireland to India.

But that pipeline can run both ways. Despite hiring’s overall decline, outsourcing is a source of jobs to Americans like Rachel Metzger, 41, of Acworth.

Metzger had been in corporate America, then opened and ran a cafe that lasted 2 1/2 years — until the recession did it in. She considered a return to the corporate world, but wanted more flexibility so she could take care of her 12-year-old daughter.

Now, she is a full-time freelancer, picking up jobs mostly through California-based oDesk Corp., which runs an outsourcing Web site. “It is working out so well,” she said. “I could work more than 40 hours if I wanted.”

The company says it posts more than 10,000 new jobs each month and about half are filled. About 10 percent of what the client company pays goes to oDesk, but Metzger has worked her portion of the fee up to around $30 an hour.

“The potential is there to make as much money as you would with a corporate job,” Metzger said.

Unfortunately, online jobs are not appearing as fast as others are being lost.

While there are pockets of hiring, the overall picture is glum. The job market in the Northeast is falling the fastest. But hiring in the South is down 12 percent from a month earlier, and about 27 percent in the past year, according to JOLTS.