7 million lost jobs: Gone forever?

A two-year string of job losses appears to be near an end, if it hasn't ended already.

When the government releases its jobs report for December on Friday morning, some believe it will show an increase in hiring. That would be the first rise in payrolls in two years, although the consensus of economists surveyed by Briefing.com is for another loss of 35,000 jobs.

Most economists don't expect the employment picture to significantly improve anytime this year -- or over the next few years for that matter.

The unemployment rate, which stood at 10% in November, is expected to stay uncomfortably high for the foreseeable future. Some experts even suggest that the labor market won't be able to fully recover from the 7.2 million jobs lost since the start of 2008 before another recession and round of job losses.

This probably won't be a jobless recovery, like the 21-month period that followed the 2001 recession during which an additional 1.1 million jobs were lost. Most economists are looking for employers to start adding to U.S. payrolls early this year.
10 Best Places for jobs

The first step of climbing out of the job hole is to stop digging. So a positive payroll number would be significant. But the hole the economy fell into during the Great Recession is so deep, the return of hiring won't do much to significantly fix the weak job market.

"The problem is recovery doesn't mean recovered," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute. "We need a long recovery to get back 7 million jobs."

Achuthan believes even if there is decent growth this year, there will be slow growth over the course of the expansion. That means it could take as long as 10 years to recover all the lost jobs -- and that assumes that there isn't another recession in that time frame. Achuthan believes another recession later this decade is likely.

Unless there is a huge shift in government policy to cutting spending, we will not get back to 5% unemployment anytime in the foreseeable future," he said. To top of page