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NEW YORK - The bar was crowded with well-dressed professionals enjoying drinks and conversation, a typical evening - except that many of them had no job.

The event was a Wall Street Pink Slip Party, where the unemployed mix with recruiters and curious bystanders to network, look for work, and share their stories.

With employers shedding 600,000 more jobs in January, the undercurrent at this party in a Manhattan bar was decidedly glum.

"Wall Street, directly or indirectly, has ruined the best 10 years of my life," said Susan Lange, speaking of colleagues and friends she lost on Sept. 11, 2001, and the sense now, after being laid off from her job as an AIG training manager, that her world has again turned on its head.

"I'm devastated," the 39-year-old woman said.

Figures released Friday showed that the unemployment rate hit 7.6 in January, a month with more layoffs than at any other time since 1974.

Jobseekers are gathering in bars, delving into the business networking Web site LinkedIn, waiting in lines at city help centers, and even starting up hopeful conversations with prosperous-looking strangers on commuter trains - all in the hope of landing jobs in what seems to be a shrinking pool of opportunity.

"Places have hiring freezes. And they have cutbacks. And they have layoffs. There are a lot more people in the job market," said 32-year-old Ana Arrendell, who has been searching for work since August.

At first, she was looking only for a job in her field, graphic design. But as the months have gone by, Arrendell has lowered her expectations. "Right now, I'll take anything," she said Friday as she left a New York City-run office that offers resume-writing assistance and interview training.

Already having given up hope for a Wall Street job making $80,000 per year right out of college, recent graduate David Gunther is getting creative as he tries to expand his business network.

The 23-year-old has begun hanging around commuter ferries and suburban trains, chatting up professional-looking types traveling to areas where executives live.

Recently, at an electronica concert - a wildly different atmosphere than at the career services office at his university - he talked to some fans who introduced him to an entertainment-industry manager. Now he's preparing for a job interview with the man.

Gunther isn't the only one looking for new ways to meet people. Among the groups using the networking service Meetup, the NYC Job Seekers & Career Strategy group has more than doubled in size to 454 people since September, with more than 95 joining since the first of the year.

Worldwide, Meetup has seen a boom in career-related groups; more than 2,000 were started in January, compared to about 500 a month over the summer, said spokesman Andres Glusman.

Chandlee Bryan, a resume writer and career coach who acts as facilitator for the New York group, says she has seen it transform. Initially, people attending the meetings were pondering a career switch out of a desire for something new.

Now, participants in talks on online networking and interviewing techniques are more often being forced into the hunt, either because they've been laid off or because they believe they might be.

Bryan says the meetings help people fight off the solitude that comes with being jobless.
"There's a great deal of isolation," she said. "That complicates the process and makes it harder, given that the majority of people find their jobs through networking."

That's the point of the Wall Street Pink Slip Party - modeled after similar events held following the dot-com bust. Since the reincarnation was launched in November, the intensity at the parties is increasing, says organizer Rachel Pine.

The first event drew a mix of people, only a quarter of them laid off. By the Feb. 4 event, 85 to 90 percent of the 400 people were looking for work.

The scene at the bustling Public House bar on Wednesday night was varied, as men and women in a mix of suits and corporate casual wear - and pink glow-in-the-dark wristbands that marked them as jobseekers - homed in on recruiters wearing green wristbands.

Some were approaching their job search with equanimity, figuring they could rely on savings socked away during the flush years. Others seemed more desperate, counting their change after paying for the coat check. Some, drink in hand, sounded almost bitter about their personal economic downturn.

Andrea Bouwman recounted watching the Super Bowl with a growing sense of ire, as she saw the millions of dollars that her former employer PepsiCo had spent on advertising instead of salaries.
"They kind of compromised people for the actual advertising," said the former marketing manager, adding that since she got her pink slip she's been drinking only Coca-Cola.

Options are more limited back at the city employment center in Brooklyn, where 43-year-old Desmond Moulton, who held jobs as a retail salesman, recounts months of dashed hopes.

Most recently he returned to the job placement center, only to see a once-enthusiastic counselor turn somber as she studied his prospects.

"She clearly wanted to help me. She clearly wanted to have some good news to give me," he said. "But she had none."

By Samantha Gross, Associated Press Writer

Labels: hot trends 2009, layoffs, Wall Street Pink Slip Party

WASHINGTON - The number of people receiving unemployment benefits has reached an all-time record, the government said Thursday, and more layoffs are spreading throughout the economy.

The Labor Department reported that the number of Americans continuing to claim unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 17 was a seasonally adjusted 4.78 million, the highest on records dating back to 1967. That's an increase of 159,000 from the previous week and worse than economists' expectations of 4.65 million.

As a proportion of the work force, the tally of unemployment benefit recipients is the highest since August 1983, a department analyst said.

The total released by the department doesn't include about 1.7 million people receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program authorized by Congress last summer. That means the total number of recipients is actually closer to 6.5 million people.

Businesses continued to hemorrhage jobs Thursday. Ford Motor Co. reported a fourth-quarter loss of $5.9 billion and said its credit arm would cut 20 percent of its work force, or 1,200 jobs.

Eastman Kodak Co. said it's cutting 3,500 to 4,500 jobs, or 14 to 18 percent of its work force, as it posted a $137 million quarterly loss on plunging sales of photography products.

In another sign of the deepening recession, the Commerce Department said Thursday that new orders for durable goods dropped by 2.6 percent last month, even worse than the 2 percent decline economists expected. Orders fell 5.7 percent for the year, the second biggest drop on government records, exceeded only by a 10.7 percent plunge in 2001.

The financial markets fell on the news. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped about 110 points in morning trading.

The tally of Americans filing new jobless benefit claims rose slightly to a seasonally adjusted 588,000 last week, from a downwardly revised figure of 585,000 the previous week. That also was worse than analysts' forecast of 575,000 new claims.

The number of initial claims is close to the 26-year high of 589,000 reached in late December, though the work force has grown by about half since then.

The record number of ongoing benefit claims is an indication that laid-off workers are having a difficult time finding new jobs, economists said.

"This highlights the key point that the trend in gross hirings has slowed as abruptly as the trend in gross firings ... has risen," Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note.

A year ago, continuing claims stood at about 2.7 million, less than half their current level when the extended unemployment program is included.

Abiel Reinhart, an economic analyst at JPMorgan Chase, said the report indicates the unemployment rate likely rose this month. January's figure will be released Feb. 6.

The rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, a 16-year high. Employers cut an average of 510,000 jobs in the last three months of 2008, and may cut a similar amount in January, Reinhart said.

The crush of new and continuing claims has overwhelmed many states' ability to process them all. Electronic filing systems crashed in three states earlier this month, and last week Michigan said it would hire 276 workers and open a fourth call center to handle increased phone traffic.

President Barack Obama's $819 billion economic stimulus package, approved by the House Wednesday and now on its way to the Senate, would provide $500 million to the states to upgrade their unemployment insurance systems. The measure also continues the extended unemployment compensation program, which adds up to 33 weeks of benefits, until the end of the year.

Companies have announced a huge number of layoffs this week as they prepare for an extended period of economic weakness. Economists expect the current recession, which began in December 2007, to be the longest since World War II.

Starbucks Corp. on Wednesday said it would cut 6,700 jobs. The coffee company also said it would close 300 underperforming stores, on top of 600 it already planned to shut down.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL division is cutting up to 700 jobs, or about 10 percent of the online unit's work force. And IBM Corp. has cut thousands of jobs in its sales, software and hardware divisions in the past week, without announcing specific numbers.

Boeing Co., Pfizer Inc., Home Depot Inc. and other U.S. corporate titans also have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this week alone.

Companies have announced about 130,000 layoffs in January, according to an Associated Press tally.

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

Labels: hot trends 2009, layoffs, unemployment