In a matter of weeks, the economic hit from the coronavirus has wiped out a decade’s worth of employment gains. On Thursday, a report showed U.S. jobless claims rose by another 4.4 million, bringing the five-week total to more than 26 million. That’s the steepest downturn for the American labor market since the Great Depression. More troubling for any long-term recovery, however, may be those who keep their jobs but watch their careers stall. Here’s where a lesson from 2008 might be useful.
For many millennials, the Great Recession wasn’t a crisis of unemployment so much as job stagnation and underemployment – putting in fewer hours than desired, or not tapping one’s full range of skills and productivity. I lived my own version of this, having started my first real job a month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Grateful simply to be employed, I looked past the unglamorous task of writing earnings headlines from press releases, which are now cranked out by algorithms. I was bringing in a mid-five-figure salary and felt like a millionaire.
