High-Tech Cities See No Job Growth, High Unemployment
A new report by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago, shows that U.S. high-technology workers are still facing chronic unemployment and a serious jobs deficit despite an economic recovery being declared three years ago.
The report, entitled “America’s High-Tech Bust,” found that the U.S. high-tech economy continued to lose a whopping 200,000 jobs after the recession was declared over in November 2001 by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
This is the first time a report has tried to tackle the impact of the economic bust for high-tech workers at a national level.
The report found that high-tech workers have seen a doubling of unemployment rates in the past three years. The University of Illinois at Chicago conducted the research for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a local of the Communications Workers of America.
The report goes on to analyze job growth and unemployment in six key regional high-tech labor markets. For example, San Jose continued to lose more than 14,000 IT jobs after November 2001, and its neighbor to the north, San Francisco , lost 9,300. The unemployment rate faced by San Jose area technology employees still remains high, going from 1 percent in 1997 to more than 6 percent by 2002, and in San Francisco from 1.3 percent in 1997 to more than 8.8 percent in 2002, the last year for which data are available.
The other labor markets studied are Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, DC. Nearly every labor market mirrored the Silicon Valley’s experience, with Washington, DC the only location to show positive job growth in the past year.
The report cited offshore outsourcing as contributing to the lack of strong job creation in this sector.
Read the full report here. [Acrobat 95K].
