Before I dive into more details, let me present some context data. We are talking about the effect of the recent US recession on the US IT job market dating the start of recession through April 2004. Officially, the recession started in March, 2001 and ended in November, 2001. However, the picture of the high tech job market, beyond these dates, has been a lot different. Excerpted from the study, below are the numbers of people employed across the US in the High tech industry at different times between March, 2001 (start of the recession) and April, 2004. If you expect the number of high-tech jobs to be on the rise, even marginal, from the time the recession officially ended, you are wrong!
Nation
=====
March 2001: 2,146,800
November 2001: 1,949,800
March 2002: 1,876,700
March 2003: 1,763,700
March 2004: 1,744,000
April 2004: 1,743,500
This research study takes into account 6 key metropolitan areas across the US. They are Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle and Washinton DC. Please note that the research has not been restricted to only these cities. It accounts for the metropolitan area. As an example, Seattle takes into account the Seattle, Bellevue, Everett area which ofcourse involves Redmond, home to Microsoft and At&t Wireless. The Washington DC metropoliton areas takes into its fold the MD, VA and WV states as well. Some interesting numbers. (Note: PMSA stands for Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area).
From the study:
It is worth noting that these numbers may well be an undercount of the actual impact of IT job losses as employment numbers for discrete sub-sectors of the IT industry are not available for several regions in the dataset. For example, employment data for the software publishing industry are not available for the Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco PMSAs. Similarly, employment numbers are unavailable for the ISPs, web search portals and data processing industry for the Boston and Seattle PMSAs.
The employment situation is particularly bleak in the San Francisco PMSA, which witnessed a 49% job loss between March 2001 and April 2004 and a 25% job loss post-November 2001 (Table 2 - refer to the page 6/26 in the PDF file detailing the research study).
Table 2. Month-over-Month Change in IT Industry Employment (Percentage Decline)
Significant post-recession job losses also occurred in other regions with a large IT industry presence. San Jose and Boston lost 14,000 and 12,200 jobs, respectively between the official end of the recession in November 2001 and April 2004. Chicago and Dallas each lost about 10,000 jobs during this period, and Seattle has lost 6,300 IT industry jobs since the beginning of the recession and 1,700 jobs post-recession. Washington, D.C. is the only metropolitan area in the dataset, which despite losing 8,300 jobs during the recession, added 4,100 new jobs after the end of the recession.
The study is aptly named America’s High Tech Bust. While I am almost done, I wanted to take a moment to draw attention to a report on this study presented in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
Researchers Snigdha Srivastava and Nik Theodore compiled the numbers using the Current Employment Statistics survey and the Current Population Survey. The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, was conducted for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle organization that wants to unionize workers at Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies. Marcus Courtney, head of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, said the tight job market, combined with growing fears that existing jobs will be lost to outsourcing, has increased interest in unionizing from workers at companies including Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft.
"We are really starting to see the beginnings of a high-tech labor movement in this country," he said.
Now that, is concerning!
No comments:
Post a Comment