Layoffs hit people who thought their jobs were secure, including white-collar professionals. “I always felt untouchable.”
By Eric Morath, Harriet Torry and Gwynn Guilford April 14, 2020 9:53 am ET The first people to lose their jobs worked at restaurants, malls, hotels and other places that closed to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Higher skilled work, which often didn’t require personal contact, seemed more secure.A second wave of job loss is hitting those who thought they were safe. Businesses that set up employees to work from home are laying them off as sales plummet. Corporate lawyers are seeing jobs dry up.
Oxford Economics, a U.K.-based forecasting and consulting firm, projects April’s jobs report, which will capture late-March layoffs, will show cuts to 3.4 million business-services workers, including lawyers, architects, consultants and advertising professionals, as well 1.5 million nonessential health-care workers and 100,000 information workers, including those working in the media and telecommunications.Gary Cuozzo, owner of ISG Software Group in Wallingford, Conn.
A survey of visitors to the job-search site found 39% employed in business and professional services reported they were laid off, nearly the same rate as respondents in retail and wholesale trade. Among the respondents who still had jobs, many in white-collar industries said their hours were cut. Baker Donelson, a 700-lawyer firm with some 20 offices in the southeast and mid-Atlantic region, has reduced compensation for associates and staff by 20%. Timothy Lupinacci, the firm’s chairman and chief executive, said some clients have asked the firm to stop work or defer payments. “Law firms are not going to be top of the priority,” he said.
“It went from no big deal to ‘Oh my gosh, what the hell am I going to do?’,” said Ms. Hill, who is now collecting $320 a week in unemployment benefits. She and other laid-off workers are likely to see larger payments when states distribute additional federal funds. State and local employment at first held steady during the 2007-09 recession thanks to federal stimulus, but from the recession’s end to mid-2013, it tumbled 700,000 as income and property tax receipts fell. State and local officials are again calling for federal relief to avoid cuts to services and payrolls.
Economist Amy Crews Cutts, of AC Cutts & Associates LLC, expects the labor market to take 5½ years to fully bounce back. The sheer scale of job cuts so far, even if they don’t worsen further, are “an extraordinary number of jobs to reverse and put back into the economy,” she said. “Industries that are subject to cyclical cycles, like finance, real estate and manufacturing, are likely to have layoffs,” he said. “The lockdown may be over, but there’s likely to be a prolonged period of stagnation.”
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