Job losses accelerate in wake of Covid-19 crisis

Ramona Schindelheim, editor-in-chief of WorkingNation, spoke with Yahoo Finance about the ongoing unemployment crisis during the coronavirus pandemic.

Video transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, let's move back over to the labor market now. We bring in Ramona Schindelheim. She's the Editor-in-Chief at WorkingNation. Just for where the employment kind of status in this country goes from here and what the future of work looks like, Ramona, we've seen just shocking numbers in terms of the number of layoffs, claims, furloughs. I mean, every hour it seems another major company is announcing thousands, tens of thousands of furloughs.

And I guess we're trying to make sense of what this even means, like how we can even put this into some kind of understandable context. How are you guys trying to work through kind of what the economy even is at this point?

RAMONA SCHINDELHEIM: Yeah, I think it's important to understand where it was to begin with. We were recovering from the Great-- you know, the Great Recession. So that's been since June of 2009. I had my note over here, right? And the jobs that we've added back have been not as good as the jobs that were lost. We all know about manufacturing, how that went away. There's been a lot of changes in manufacturing where automation has come in. So we're starting at a point where there's-- we're going-- we've gone from a maybe labor-intensive market to a more task-- a more knowledge-based job market.

So the people who are losing jobs now are usually the more vulnerable ones. These are the people who don't have those high skills-- the restaurant workers, the retail workers. So when we come out on the other side, these people might not have jobs because they've already had to shut-- some of these places have already shut down. So we are trying to figure out how do we talk about that? How do we move forward from that new starting point? because it's going to be totally different.

And what we're seeing is-- what we're talking about at WorkingNation is how do we get everybody on the same page? How do we get businesses, education leaders, local civic leaders, and nonprofits to start talking about how do we train these people to move into whatever jobs exist on the other side of this?

JEN ROGERS: I think it's been hard to look at some of those numbers coming out when you overlay them over where outbreaks are happening. In New York City, if you look at lower-income areas of the city, they're being hit even harder.

So, I mean, retraining definitely part of it, but can people go out and get jobs now? If you have been laid off-- you know, we keep doing stories. Oh, Walmart's hiring 100,000 people, and Facebook's going to hire 10,000 people. Are people getting hired?

RAMONA SCHINDELHEIM: There is a new dashboard. There's a company called Emsi, E-M-S-I, that's a labor-market-analytics company, and they have put out a dashboard, and it's as real-time as possible. And so I checked it earlier today. There's 56,000 jobs listed for Amazon, 19,000 of them in Washington state. So they're hiring there.

There is a need for cybersecurity workers because as we've been hit with this pandemic, there's a lot of cyber criminals out there who are sending phishing emails to try to get you to click on something and as more people go remote for work and remote for learning. So there are jobs in cybersecurity. Obviously there are jobs-- some jobs in health care. As we saw in today's numbers, there are small offices, dentists, and doctors who have shut down and people have been laid off.

So there are pockets. Infrastructure is an essential part of the workforce-- water, utilities, electricity. So some of those places are hiring. But again, a lot of what I'm talking about are skilled workers. So where does that leave the vulnerable, the people who have been working part time? They are taking some of those jobs as delivery people. They still-- they're living paycheck to paycheck. So they are taking those jobs so they can pay their rent. They can buy food for themselves.

So that's where-- I think what the pandemic has done, it has exposed that vulnerability that the headline unemployment numbers didn't really tell us. So when you see 3.5% unemployed, that doesn't count all the people working part time because they can't work full time or they don't have the skills.

We had seen that there were 7 million open jobs that businesses before the pandemic had said they can't fill. And again, these are skilled numbers that people-- or skilled jobs that people want. So the people who don't have those skills, maybe don't have the education, they're taking the-- I think they're taking the delivery jobs now.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Ramona, Rick Newman. If you are somebody who lost a job or thinks you're likely to lose your job, is there anything you can do during this period of joblessness to improve your odds of landing on your feet? You know, one of the worst things about that sense of desperation is just the powerlessness. Like, you know, what can I do about this? What can you do other than wait and hope?

RAMONA SCHINDELHEIM: You know, it's hard-- we use-- pick our language very carefully on this because we're not telling people, you've lost your job. Go and pay for [INAUDIBLE]. Learn how to be a [INAUDIBLE]. But if you are [INAUDIBLE] and you have the time, there's some free classes on [INAUDIBLE] unlocked 16 classes that are [INAUDIBLE] skills that [INAUDIBLE] are demands. There are courses that you pay for. There are short courses that you pay for through community colleges.

And we are trying-- at WorkingNation, we've talked about a lot of these in the past, and we're going to be talking about these in the future. So we will be putting that information out there.

And again, if you don't have money for it, we're trying-- we're putting together a list of resources where you can go to learn some of the skills that are likely to be in demand when this eases up when people start going back to work and they're not stuck in their homes.

MYLES UDLAND: All right. Ramona Schindelheim is the editor-in-chief at WorkingNation. Thanks so much for joining today.

RAMONA SCHINDELHEIM: Thank you very much for having me.