An accelerating job machine has carried metro Atlanta out of recession and into the Great In-between – a place where hope rises but wages don’t, where large numbers of people are still jobless but hiring is healthy.
More of the unemployed are finding work, and more people who have jobs are leaving them in search of something better. Some people who have been out of the labor market completely are ready to jump back in.
“I raised a lot of kids and I am in an empty nest,” said Tiffany Moen, 49, who attended a state-sponsored job fair in Cumming last week. “I have a lot of sales and marketing in my background and now I’m trying to see where I fit in today’s job market.”
Yet economists are hardly euphoric, saying the metrics are too mixed to declare recovery complete. Interviews with jobseekers and employers suggest the same.
The past 12 months have seen more jobs added than in any 12-month period since June 1999, while the metro unemployment rate has dropped from a 2011 high of 10.7 percent down to 6.1 percent.
“The labor market is improving, and the issue is, how much slack is still left in the labor market?” said John Robertson, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
In a tight labor market, when employers have trouble filling positions, companies typically start paying more to attract the workers they want. That can fuel inflation and spur the Federal Reserve’s elite committee to start lifting short-term interest rates.
That hasn’t been happening, despite more hiring, Robertson said.
“The labor markets are gradually tightening, which is different than saying that it’s tight,” he said.
The number of officially unemployed people has shrunk dramatically. But the balance of supply and demand – the number of jobs being filled and the number of people who could fill them – has not improved as much as it appears.
A hidden surplus
That is because the official unemployment rate can shroud a hidden surplus of workers. It doesn’t count anyone who has given up looking, or students, or people with part-time jobs who want to work full-time, or people who have retired even though they’d rather be still holding a regular job.
Eric Baker, 57, of Kennesaw is working just 18 hours a week, but he wants a full-time job in customer service or customer support.
“I am underemployed, and I have been underemployed for too long. Two or three years.”
The unemployment rate also doesn’t include people who sell clothes on eBay, crafts on Etsy or antiques on Ruby Lane. Not to mention those who babysit or do yard work for cash. Such people have some income but a hotter job market would pull some of them back into the full-time work world.
The Internet has enabled many kinds of jobs – like driving for Uber or Lyft – that may not always show up in official data and may also undermine wages in some sectors, noted Jeff Wenger, an associate professer at the University of Georgia. He said that may be one reason wages for many jobs have barely budged or even dropped.
“If you lower the costs of entering the labor market, your supply of labor will increase and if you have more labor, the wages can be expected to go down,” he said. “That is completely consistent with what we have been observing.”
The ratio of people with jobs to the overall population in Georgia has fallen for about 15 years but the pace quickened with the 2007-09 recession.
Economists debate the reasons: the Fed says about half is due to older workers retiring. That leaves millions who’ve dropped out for other reasons – going back to school, staying home with kids or just defeated by a tough job search.
“We have a lot of people on the sidelines who have been waiting to get back into the labor market,” Wenger said.
Still recovering
In the wake of the Great Recession, the job market simply hasn’t improved enough to undo all the damage as the nation faced a flood of foreclosures, dropping home ownership rates and crippling household debt.
People at the ends of the spectrum — millennials fresh on the market and pre-retirement workers forced into it by restructurings or cutbacks — are having particular trouble.
Fran Whitfield, 60, of Canton, is losing her part-time job and has had no luck finding full-time work.
“I think it’s age,” she said, at a Canton job fair. “I have a lot of experience (in accounting) and they think they’ll have to pay me for it. But I just want a job.”
Wages for many lower-level jobs are not rising.
The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, which provides help to needy families in Atlanta, sees many people who are working but not making enough to avoid needing help, said Serene Coleman, director of programs for the society.
“It’s as simple as that,” she said. “It’s not that they can’t find a job as a cashier at McDonald’s or as a bagger at Kroger. Where they are having trouble is in finding a job that sustains them and their families.”
Still, there are signs of change.
“Manufacturing, construction – we’re seeing more infrastructure projects than we were before,” said Ryan Schadel, president & CEO of LaborSMART, an Atlanta-based staffing company that has about 2,300 workers on the job.
“Pay is definitely starting to move up – no question. Everything starts with construction. If construction is moving along, then everything else just follows suit.”
Some area businesses are not just hiring, they’re hiring a lot.
MarketSource, for example, has been growing at a 20 percent clip, said Mike Christensen, executive vice president of the Alpharetta-based company. “Year to date, we have already added 150 people in metro Atlanta.”
The company helps other businesses ramp up sales, often through training. Ten percent of its 8,500 employees are in this area, he said.
No bidding wars yet
A few years ago, job applicants were modest in their short-term goals, Christensen said. “Sometimes they were going sideways or even taking a step back to stay employed. Definitely the market has turned around during the past year. (Job) postings are up 40 percent over the past year. But we are not in bidding wars, yet.”
People who sense improvement are more willing to take chances on a job change.
Alexandra Degenhard, 39, of Ball Ground, left a job in October because she got tired of the commute. She’s tried substitute teaching and has taken a course in medical terminology. Two weeks ago she stood in line at the Canton job fair to talk to someone at Northside Hospital about job possibilities.
Because her husband works, she doesn’t need to take just anything, she said. “We’re fine right now. But I would really like having the extra income.”
An improving job market can enable bigger life changes as well.
Seth Crenshaw, 28, is leaving a job in South Carolina and moving to metro Atlanta so he can marry a Dawsonville woman. He has a degree in graphic design and has looked for a couple months for jobs in that field.
“Hopefully within the next few months, I’ll find something. It’s a great opportunity for me to start fresh at a new job in Georgia.”
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