Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25”‘year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values ”” and women will increasingly be at the controls. Here are 10 ways your job will change. In fact, it already has.

Check out the whole thing.

Dealers across the United States reacted with a mixture of anger and sadness on Thursday to word that bankrupt automaker Chrysler LLC plans to eliminate franchise agreements with them as part of its restructuring efforts.

But most, even those surprised by the news, entertained little hope they could stop Chrysler from following through on the proposed closures, the latest chapter in the decline of a company that was — for a brief period in the 1990s — the most profitable car manufacturer in the world.

As a result, the dealers said they were already taking the sad but necessary preliminary steps to close or consolidate businesses that, in many cases, had carried their family names as well as those of the automaker for generations.

Read it all.

Where does this leave us? The Federal Reserve is caught; policymakers are warily watching the economy, worried that their liquidity injections will catch fire. On the other hand, they suspect that the economy will demand greater stimulus, if their estimates of the Taylor Rule are any guide. Caught, they want to remain flexible, and hence are unwilling to commit to numerical targets, either money growth or long rates. Hard to blame them; for the last decade, excessive easing has always caused something seemingly good that was followed by something very bad. But with the output gap certain to widen, the bias will be on the side of additional easing, while the timing will be data dependent. The green shoots story is looking a little tired today; a wide swath of indicators in the commodities market suggests that overall demand remains subdued. That will not stop a segment of market participants from playing up the green shoots story – they want to get ahead of the next big move. I remain wary that there is any room for an easy bounceback; I can’t shake off memories of 2001-2003, and I don’t see where we get another asset bubble in the US to crank up the wealth engine.

Read it all.

As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

Health care, housing, food stamps and cash ”” each forms a separate bureaucratic world, and their dictates often collide. State differences make the patchwork more pronounced, and random foibles can intervene, like a computer debacle in Colorado that made it harder to get food stamps and Medicaid.

The result is a hit-or-miss system of relief, never designed to grapple with the pain of a recession so sudden and deep. Aid seekers often find the rules opaque and arbitrary. And officials often struggle to make policy through a system so complex and Balkanized.

Across the country, hard luck is colliding with fine print.

Read it all.

Eleven weeks after Congress settled on a stimulus package that provided $135 billion to limit layoffs in state governments, many states are finding that the funds are not enough and are moving to lay off thousands of public employees.

The state of Washington settled on a budget two weeks ago that will mean 1,000 layoffs at public colleges and several times that many in elementary and high schools.

The governor of Massachusetts, who cut 1,000 positions late last year, just announced 250 layoffs, with more likely to come soon.

Arizona has already laid off 800 social service workers this year and is facing the likelihood of deeper cuts over the next two. The state no longer investigates all complaints of child or elder abuse.

Read it all.

Millions of Americans have found themselves out of work since the recession began, but even those who can find employment often must settle for jobs they’re overqualified for.

Midcareer professionals from fields like banking and technology have been forced into entry-level positions at places like restaurants and stores. Or they’ve settled for part-time work because they can’t find a 9-to-5 job.

They’re considered underemployed by employment analysts. And their numbers aren’t reflected in the Labor Department’s metrics.

Read the whole piece.

More than four million Spanish people are out of work. According to the country’s National Statistics Institute a record high figure of 17.4 per cent were unemployed in the first quarter of the year.

Unemployment leapt from 13.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008, the biggest quarterly jump since 1976. Joblessness in Spain has almost doubled in a year.

The Bank of Spain had previously forecast that unemployment would not surpass 17.1 per cent for the year. Alarmingly, 1,068,400 families have every member out of work.

Read it all.

Stranded by the nationwide slump in housing and jobs, fewer Americans are moving, the Census Bureau said Wednesday.

The bureau found that the number of people who changed residences declined to 35.2 million from March 2007 to March 2008, the lowest number since 1962, when the nation had 120 million fewer people.

Experts said the lack of mobility was of concern on two fronts. It suggests that Americans were unable or unwilling to follow any job opportunities that may have existed around the country, as they have in the past. And the lack of movement itself, they said, could have an impact on the economy, reducing the economic activity generated by moves.

Read it all.

Japan’s offer, extended to hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Latin American immigrants, is part of a new drive to encourage them to leave this recession-racked country. So far, at least 100 workers and their families have agreed to leave, Japanese officials said.

But critics denounce the program as shortsighted, inhumane and a threat to what little progress Japan has made in opening its economy to foreign workers.

“It’s a disgrace. It’s cold-hearted,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization.

Read it all.

Tacoma, WA: Officials were totally unprepared when they advertised 1 job opening for meter reader. Job requirements are a high school diploma and able to walk 5-7 miles daily.Normally they get 50-70 application but in the two weeks the job was listed they received 1400 applications.

Read all about it.

Although South Carolina’s jobless rate tied a 26-year record last month, analysts found a few bright spots in the monthly report released Friday.

The state recorded its first increase in total jobs since August and most counties reported declines in unemployment. South Carolina also was replaced as the state with the nation’s second-highest jobless rate.

But economists said that, by the end of the year, things probably will get worse than the 11.4 percent reading in March, a half-percentage point rise over February.

Read it all.

The president and the Federal Reserve chairman voiced cautious optimism yesterday that the economy could be beginning to stabilize. But the economy wasn’t cooperating.

Retail sales dropped sharply in March, the government reported, and wholesale prices fell steeply. Both pieces of data underscore the hard slog the nation faces to emerge from its deep recession and the limitations of more optimistic talk from Washington. The stock market fell 2 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

President Obama and Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke were hardly effusive. Obama acknowledged that “there will be more job loss, more foreclosures and more pain” before the recession ends. But both men, in separate speeches, spoke of an end to the sense of free-fall that enveloped the U.S. economy in the final months of 2008 and first months of 2009.

Their words reflect a new phase of the government response to the financial crisis and recession. Unlike a few months ago, the major policies meant to prop up the economy– increased government spending, special lending programs and extensive efforts by the Fed to pump money into the economy — are now largely in place. Thus, senior officials are trying to encourage Americans to be confident about the future, so that those who still have their jobs will feel more comfortable buying a house, a car or other large items.

Read it all.

In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.

Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.

Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

PAUL SOLMAN: But in this crisis, Conn-Selmer was making more horns than the market would bear. So it tried a new approach, what it calls pain-sharing. Instead of cuts in hourly pay or massive layoffs, CEO John Stoner suggested cutting the work week.

JOHN STONER, CEO, Conn-Selmer: We felt pretty comfortable that, with everything else going on in the Elkhart community, knowing people with neighbors who’re losing jobs, that they would say, “I’d rather have a job even four days a week than not having a job.”

PAUL SOLMAN: With layoffs and a wage freeze for higher-paid salaried workers, some 25 jobs have been saved in a factory of 125 line workers, one of whom is Ryan Porzelius, fiddling here with a flugelhorn.

RYAN PORZELIUS: This way more people get to work. You know, I’m not a selfish guy. I don’t mind giving up a little for the greater good of the whole.

Read it all.

Today, more and more children are being raised by their grandparents. These grandparents provide a crucial safety net, allowing children whose parents can’t provide for them to remain in families, instead of winding up as wards of the state. But as the recession hits “grandfamilies,” that safety net is under stress.

The unemployment rate for older workers is lower than the overall rate. But once they become unemployed, older workers find it harder to land a job and they tend to remain out of work longer than younger workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for those 55 and over has been climbing significantly in recent months; in March, it rose to 6.2% — the highest it has been since September, 1949, according the bureau.

At the same time, the number of grandfamilies has been growing. In 1970, about 3% of all children under 18 lived in households headed by a grandparent. By 2007, 4.7 million kids — or 6.5% of American children — were living in households headed by a grandparent, according to Census Bureau data. This shift was driven by a variety of factors, including more parents hit by drug use, AIDS or cancer, and the large numbers of single parents who, if struck by tragedy, leave children behind.

Not all of these grandparents are sole caregivers, says Kenneth Bryson, a director at Generations United, a Washington nonprofit, “but most are making important contributions,” providing “substantial care so that the parents can work or go to school.”

Caught this one on the way home yesterday on the plane. Take the time to read it all. The portrait of the lead character and her six year old granddaughter is especially heart-rending–KSH.

Last autumn most of my friends’ lives looked as if they might be recession-proof. I don’t know many people who work in the City, or for wobbly high street chains, and although house prices were dropping and everything was getting a bit stressful, I wasn’t personally acquainted with more than two people who’d actually lost their jobs or seemed at risk. They were feeling poorer, yes, booking holidays in Britain, going out less, not buying new clothes, buying cheaper food at cheaper supermarkets, even thinking about taking their children out of private school (although one friend who informed the headmistress of her intentions was quickly whisked aside and offered a 50% reduction in fees, applicable immediately). But they weren’t sitting in mortal fear of unemployment.

Fast forward six months and everyone’s dropping like flies. The only people who I know are doing well are my hairdressers since, apparently, people in search of cheering up the hard times with a non-grey root or a blowdry no longer travel to West End salons but walk to their local one.

Read it all.

“We’re just sitting here all day long looking for jobs on the computer, frustrated and scared as hell…I’m looking for anything.”

—Henry Pevez of New Jersey in a front page story from today’s New York Times about yesterday’s unemployment report

The good news from our historical study of eight centuries of international financial crises is that, so far, they have all ended. And we confidently predict this one will end, too. We are just not quite so sure it will be nearly as soon as the chirpy forecasts coming from policymakers around the globe. The U.S. administration, for example, is now predicting that growth will renew in the latter part of this year and continue at a brisk pace of 4 percent for several years thereafter. Is this a fact-based forecast or wishful thinking?

A careful look at the international evidence on severe banking crises suggests a far more cautious assessment. The recessions that follow in the wake of big financial crises tend to last far longer than normal downturns, and to cause considerably more damage. If the United States follows the norm of recent crises, as it has until now, output may take four years to return to its pre-crisis level. Unemployment will continue to rise for three more years, reaching 11”“12 percent in 2011.

Read it all.

Plenty of people dream of leaving their jobs to become teachers. Today, more people are actually doing it.

Peter Vos ran an Internet start-up. Now he teaches computer science to middle school kids in Maryland.

Jaime McLaughlin used to do people’s taxes. Now he teaches math to sixth graders in Chicago.

Alisa Salvans was a makeup artist at Saks department store. Now she teaches high school chemistry in suburban Dallas.

Read it all.

As many as three million people took to the streets across France today to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis and demand more help for struggling workers.

The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy’s pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs.

Read it all.

Aside from the president he’s the most powerful man working to save the economy, but you have never seen an interview with Ben Bernanke.

Bernanke is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, better known as the Fed. The words of any Fed chairman cause fortunes to rise and fall and so, by tradition, chairmen of the Fed do not do interviews – that is until now.

The Federal Reserve controls the economy by setting interest rates. But after the crash of 2008, Bernanke invoked emergency powers, and with unprecedented aggressiveness has thrown a trillion dollars at the crisis.

Ben Bernanke may be the most important Fed chairman in history. The question is, can he help lead America out of this deep recession and when?

Read it all. If you have the time, I highly recommend watching the video version. I thought the chairman did well–KSH.

Update: Barry Ritholtz has comments on the interview here.

Alex Andon, 24, a graduate of Duke University in biology, was laid off from a biotech company last May. For months he sought new work. Then, frustrated with the hunt, he turned to jellyfish.

In an apartment he shares here with six roommates, Mr. Andon started a business in September building jellyfish aquariums, capitalizing on new technology that helps the fragile creatures survive in captivity. He has sold three tanks, one for $25,000 to a restaurant, and is starting a Web site to sell desktop versions for $350.

“I keep getting stung,” he said. And his crowded home office is filled with beakers and test tubes of jellyfish food. “But it beats looking for work. I hate looking for work.”

Read it all.

Ruthie Christy firmly believes that God will take care of her in life. But right now, she could use a little help from the government as well.

Christy and her husband have been scrambling to keep themselves afloat since January, when a local paper mill cut his work schedule to as little as six days a month. They’ve put off paying bills, asked creditors for extensions and used whatever money they could to pay the mortgage on their North Charleston home.

Christy, 57, is still trying to come up with the cash to cover last month’s mortgage payment, with another round soon coming due. She’s tried to refinance her Ranger Drive home but can’t find any institution willing to write the loan.

Read it all.

TORY JOHNSON, the owner of Women for Hire, has been running job fairs in 10 of America’s largest cities for the last decade, and during that time she has never had more than 2,000 people come to the events. Last Tuesday, at a little after 3 p.m., after the last person had checked in at her latest job fair at the Sheraton Manhattan, she showed me the counter she uses to keep track of attendance: 5,103.

“Never,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing ever like this before.” Many of the women and men (she opened the event to men for the first time) had waited over two hours on the sidewalk in 20 degree temperature, or close to minus-7 centigrade, for the chance to mill through a ballroom, push to the front of a line at one of the 40 employer booths, hand a rep a résumé, maybe get a minute of face time and collect a business card or two.

“Very humbling,” said Pat Gericke, 61, of Manhattan who has had a successful interior design business for 20 years that suddenly went dead last fall. “I never thought I’d be at one of these.”

Read it all.

Mark Cooper started his work day on a recent morning cleaning the door handles of an office building with a rag, vigorously shaking out a rug at a back entrance and pushing a dust mop down a long hallway.

Nine months ago he lost his job as the security manager for the western United States for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning about $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful for the $12 an hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a “survival job” at a friend’s janitorial services company. But that does not make the work any easier.

“You’re fighting despair, discouragement, depression every day,” Mr. Cooper said.

Working five days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mr. Cooper is not counted by traditional measures as among the recession’s casualties at this point. But his tumble down the economic ladder is among the more disquieting and often hidden aspects of the downturn.

What interested me most about this story was the picture. Make sure not to miss it. Pretty unusual for a front page NY Times story above the fold. Read it all–KSH.

“Our view is the economy will continue to deteriorate sharply this quarter and next quarter and be pretty weak second quarter and maybe sort of see stability fourth quarter, and then I think you will have a pretty, and a weak 2010 although I don’t think it will keep declining”¦I think 2011 will show some growth but still be well below the levels of 2006 and 2007. My own view is you may not get back to 2006 and 2007 a long time because we have sort of an emotional and psychic shift going on in America which is back to basics don’t live on leverage, live within your means, more humble life styles, less extravagant consumption, savings and all of that sort of stuff.

I believe that a lot of people in America are legitimately scared and have seen their life savings or what they perceived as their net worth largely either wiped out or cut in half. That’s going to forge fundamental behavioral differences and that will retard the growth.”

—Stephen Allen Schwarzman, Co-Founder and CEO of The Blackstone Group during the Company’s Fourth Quarter and 2008 Year End Earnings Conference Call yesterday

The syncopated rhythm of recession plays on repeat in a downtown Miami office building, on high-tech headsets in a room with only one window, among the voices of those seeking help.

Marie Cothias, 27, has been a state operator here since April 2007, helping Floridians with public assistance. Her calming voice and patience have made her an office favorite and, like many of her colleagues, she said she started hearing from more callers ”” with new fears ”” sometime last year.

“A lot of people were losing their jobs,” Ms. Cothias said. “A lot of people were saying, ”˜We don’t have any food for our children.’ ”

Now this call center and two others like it in Florida are overwhelmed, as are similar centers around the country. Every day, 250 operators in Florida receive up to 150,000 calls, roughly a 40 percent increase over last year.

Read it all.

David Smyly fills out job applications in the unemployment office a couple of miles, give or take, from the old textile mill downtown, where he works for the time being.

He pages through the phone book to find the street address for his high school. In the pocket of his T-shirt, he has a pack of smokes, Basic menthols, the cheapest ones in the store.

Sometime around the first of June, his work ends at Milliken & Co., which announced plans to close the plant later this year.

“I don’t know if I can make it through, but I’m gonna try,” Smyly says. He recounts the tales of a hard-knock life: a buyout about five years ago from a high-paying job he could never replace, a failed marriage and the steady grip of depression.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

I mean, yesterday in a staff meeting, one of my staffers got a call that was obviously important. She took the call and left the room on her little cell phone, came back, looked stricken. We said, “What’s wrong?” She said she had just learned her husband had lost his job.

That sort of thing is scaring the daylights out of people, and it’s happening a lot. Everybody knows a dozen people who’ve been laid off.

–Mark Funkhouser, Mayor of Kansis City, on the Lehrer News Hour Friday evening (and quoted in this morning’s sermon by KSH)