Six Job Seekers for Every Job
HARRIS: If you're looking for work, you have a lot of company. Job seekers now outnumber available jobs by the highest ratio on record. But with the economy improving, there's an end in sight. Right? Here's CNN's Maggie Lake.</s>MAGGIE LAKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Jam-packed job fairs, huge lines to turn in resumes. For the millions of people in the U.S. looking for work, the struggle to stand out seems to intensify by the day.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a lot of competition out there.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a little harder because everybody's trying to apply to the same places.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's so many people out there looking for a job right now.</s>LAKE: The odds of landing a job has never seen so remote to so many. According to recent figures, there were fewer than 2.5 million full-time job openings for the 14.5 million Americans actively looking for work during the summer. That means for every available job in the U.S., there were, on average, six job seekers fighting to fill it, the highest ratio on record. Economists see little improvement in the months to come.</s>DEAN BAKER, ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE: We're likely to continue to lose jobs through the rest of the year. And just to keep even with the growth of the labor market, labor force, we have to have about 130,000, 140,000 new jobs being created. So, we're falling further and further behind.</s>LAKE: The U.S. has been falling further behind for some time now. Since mid-2007, the number of available jobs in America has declined 50 percent, and even though companies are pleasing investors with stronger profits through cost cutting and easier profit comparisons from previous quarters, firms are still reluctant to create jobs.</s>BAKER: No businesses is going to hire just for the sake of hiring. They're going to hire because they feel they need additional workers to meet the demand. And the demand is not being created because people aren't spending, and they don't spend for the simple reason they don't have jobs.</s>HARRIS: Boy. CNN's Maggie Lake reporting. Some economists believe only a major new round of government stimulus could break this vicious cycle. Without it, some fear the fight for available jobs will remain competitive for months to come. We will talk to a Georgia Tech professor about the jobless rate. Plus, we are waiting on President Obama to speak about health care reform at the Rose Garden. You're in the CNN NEWSROOM.