Employment Picture Not Due to Improve for a While

Managers, having gotten so much more productivity out of their employees of late, want to squeeze yet more out of their present employees before they even contemplate permanent new hires. That along with the uncertainty as to how much each employee will cost under ObamaCare makes for a bleak outlook. Hot Air linked an article from the Harvard Business Review titled The Strategic Imperative Not to Hire Anybody
that details the opinions of HR managers. Here are a couple of pertinent quotes.
"My lunch companion arrived fifteen minutes late. "My phone has begun to ring again," he explained, "which is a good sign for the economy." Once a big-league strategy consultant, he now has a firm that advises CEOs on how to increase the value of their companies. "They've decided that we've touched bottom, or they wouldn't be talking to me," he said. "They're starting to think about growing their businesses again." Welcome news, but not what followed.

""But boy, I don't see employment coming back, not for years. My clients were amazed by how much productivity they could squeeze out of their people in the downturn. They're not going to start hiring again — well, maybe temps or contract workers, but not regular, full-time employees." As if to punctuate the thought he added, chillingly, "In fact, the CEOs are mad at their middle managers for not having eliminated more jobs earlier.""
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". . . the representative factory worker of the future will be a woman standing in an air-conditioned glass booth, monitoring gauges, whilst all about have fled, or been job-eliminated.

"For about five years now, particularly after dinners that featured wine, human-resources executives have been telling me, "We've come to realize we don't really want most employees for the whole of their careers. We want their particular set of skills when we need them — but then things change so fast, we don't need that particular skill set any more." And many of these are companies famous for being good at H.R."