Jobless rates lowest in three decades, but that's not counting dot-com layoffs
By Porter Anderson
CNN.com/career Editor
(CNN) -- The other shoe just kept falling on what should have been the kicking-up-its-heels American job market in 2000. The year saw some of the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years. But one of the most promising job sectors at the outset -- dot-com startups -- had shed 20 percent of its positions by December.
American careerists said they felt increasing demands to work too many hours in jobs they liked less than in the past. The well-known disparities between the work experiences of men and women deepened in subtle and disturbing ways.
Military careers took new focus, as reports of service people resorting to food stamps and living without adequate housing shamed many -- in an electorate suddenly sensitized to those military absentee ballots.
And careerists faced the arrival of the real new millennium (not last year's false one) hearing a quiet rumble that may just be a drum roll for workplace revolt.
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High-ho, high-ho. Off to work we went -- and went and went and went. By Election Day, unemployment was at a barrel-bottom 3.9 percent and had hovered for 13 months at or near a three-decade low of 4.1 percent. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's warnings of the airtight labor market were at hand. And only in the final month of the year was a pattern starting to emerge of rising unemployment claims -- November ended with the Labor Department counting 358,000 first-time jobless claims in a week.
Still, holiday shoppers found themselves invited to apply for jobs at the stores they patronized: Holly wreaths and "Help Wanted" signs made up the seasonal decor in December's malls, proving there still was a lot of work to be done by those looking for a gig.
The dot-com (out of ) work force. Even at the height of the year 2000 work boom, a purge was under way in the once-promising land of Internet startups. The consulting firm Challenger Gray and Christmas reported a record 55 percent monthly jump in dot-com layoffs for November. Those 8,789 job cuts brought the year's total to 31,056 in 383 companies -- one-fifth of those firms having gone belly up completely.
Many dot-com workers still chained to their keyboards realized their famous stock options were worth little more than the paperwork they'd shredded. Some bailed. Others pledged to stand by their CPUs.
"Desk rage." Integra Realty Resources' eye-opening survey of more than 1,300 workers, found 42 percent saying that yelling and verbal abuse took place where they worked -- and 29 percent admitted they had been among the screamers.
Half the respondents in a larger study of 5,000 households told the nonprofit Conference Board they are not satisfied with their current work. Almost 60 percent said they liked the commute to and from work better than the job itself. Business ethicist Al Gini in "My Self, My Job," wrote that many American careerists were falling prey to the "Stockholm effect" -- becoming willing prisoners to overly demanding work lives.
And as if on cue, the American Management Association announced that 80 percent of its downsizing member-corporations were shifting the load for jobs eliminated onto other workers: In other words, when many American careerists said they were left hauling the corporate load? - they were absolutely right.
Battle for the sexless (workplace): A Cornell University study showed that in dual-worker households, husbands and wives were together working nearly 80 hours per week -- but the women ended up with more stress because homemaking duties still rested largely on their shoulders. Author Michele Kremen Bolton named this "The Third Shift" worked by women but not by men.
The rate of sexual harassment allegations filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seemed to have flattened in the past five years (just over 15,000 per year), but the cases were stronger. Settlements obtained were costlier and complaints about harassment of immigrant women were rising - as were complaints filed by men.
On the air and land and sea -- and online. With estimates that some 500,000 aging military housing units needed repair -- and with an Army recruit making $930 per month, 10-year careerists less than $22,000 annually -- Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona and, for a time, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, found himself proposing the "Remove Service Members from Food Stamps Act of 2000."
All this, as the U.S. Armed Forces stepped up their Web recruiting efforts, fielding "CyberRecruiters" and gassing the ether with Flash-fancy offers of signing bonuses and college tuition to try to meet hiring goals. In the first three quarters of fiscal-year 2000, GoArmy.com had generated 64,000 Internet leads.
Remember 1789? As the year drew to a close, 36 customer service employees at San Francisco's etown.com and ShopAudioVideo.com decided to vote on whether to unionize. No blood was running across the trolley tracks yet, but this was widely recognized as the first group of new-economy careerists going for labor organization.
Up the coast in Seattle there may have been some sweat on the keypads: The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers launched an effort to organize about 400 workers at Amazon headquarters, while the Prewitt Organizing Fund backed an attempt to unionize some 5,000 Amazon distribution workers in the United States, France and Germany. Author Joanne B. Ciulla, in her book, "The Working Life," noted an AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch estimate that the average CEO was making 326 times what the average worker was making.
That average CEO would no doubt like us now to say to you: Get back to work.
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