Wall Street Journal referer ny undersøgelse af, hvor amerikanerne ser på næste generations levevilkår – Kun 16 % mener, at de vil have det bedre end nu.
Employers have been creating jobs at a good clip this year, but Americans are too exhausted and discouraged by the pain of the recession and slow recovery to see much cause for optimism.
That’s the conclusion of a new report surveying the economic sentiment of workers,released Thursday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Perhaps most strikingly, 16% of respondents agree that job and career opportunities will be better for the next generation than for their own – a drop from the 56% who were optimistic about this measure in 1999 and down even from the 40% who agreed in November 2009, well into the recession.
In addition, a majority of those surveyed believe the recession permanently altered economic conditions in the U.S.
The numbers, while measuring individuals’ feelings rather than more objective measures such as employment or income, paint a picture of a workforce scarred by personal experience with unemployment or close proximity to others who suffered.
And despite more than six consecutive months of companies adding 200,000 or more jobs, workers are still pessimistic about their prospects for finding decent work. “Only 20 percent of currently employed workers feel extremely or very confident they could find another job if they were laid off,” the researchers found.
