It’s not looking good, especially for the next few years. A recent poll of economists found that, on average, they don’t expect the U.S. unemployment rate to fall below 6% until 2013. (The unemployment rate at this writing is 9.8%.)

“Never before has business shed so many workers so fast, so many people failed to find work who are looking for work, and so many dropped out of the labor force as in the current circumstance,” said Allen Sinai at Decision Economics.

On average the economists … expect the unemployment rate to peak at 10.2% in February. But even once the employment situation stops getting worse, economists expect recovery to come slowly. “It could take until 2014-15 before we see a 5% handle on unemployment again,” said Diane Swonk at Mesirow Financial. Persistently high unemployment could prove a political hot potato not only for the 2010 midterm elections for Congress but also for the 2012 presidential election.

Rutgers economists say the U.S. job market recovery may take seven years — to late 2017. Others say it may take more than a decade to reach the 5% unemployment rate that prevailed until the economic downturn.

The headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article says it all: “It Will Be Years Before Lost Jobs Return — and Many Never Will.”

In addition to replacing 7.2 million lost jobs [from the recession], the economy needs an additional 100,000 a month to keep up with population growth. If the job market returns to the rapid pace of the 1990s — adding 2.15 million private-sector jobs a year, double the 2001-2007 pace — the U.S. wouldn’t get back to a 5% unemployment rate until late 2017, Rutgers University economist Joseph Seneca estimated. And that assumes no recession between now and then. “Even with some very optimistic assumptions, it’s a long road back,” Mr. Seneca said.

Where will the jobs come from? As the economy grows, some companies may hire back laid-off workers. But some jobs in real estate, finance, construction and leisure industries may be gone forever.

The government and progressives are counting on “green jobs” to fill the gap, but those jobs will take several years to materialize and depend on technology advancements.

It’s also not clear that “green jobs” will be high-paying jobs, as The Washington Post noted:

The report by the D.C.-based labor think tank [Good Jobs First] notes that it’s not uncommon for workers in the green field to earn as little as $8.25 an hour. Wages at a number of wind and solar manufacturers are far lower than those at their more traditional counterparts — falling well below the income levels needed to support a single adult with one child.

Returning to The Wall Street Journal article: Economic consulting firm IHS Global Insights predicts the total number of jobs in the U.S. won’t return to pre-recession levels until 2013.

And that doesn’t account for the growth in the labor force, so it forecasts unemployment will be a painfully high 8.1% then. Getting back to the 5% unemployment rate that prevailed before the downturn isn’t anywhere in the firm’s 10-year forecast horizon. At the end of 2019, it puts unemployment at 5.75%.

To further illustrate the long slog ahead, consider that economists say that the U.S. economy would have to grow by about 4.5% in 2010 to whittle away just one percentage point from the unemployment rate, according to another article.

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Twitter: RT @mitchbetts The future of unemployment: Bad news through 2014 or even beyond. http://wp.me/p5bxZ-6P

Gleaned from recent press reports and other sources:

These are boom times for U.S. makers of unmanned military aircraft (drones).

Sample Lab Ltd. opened a  “marketing cafe” in Tokyo that lets trend-setting women see and test new products.

With the recession crimping legal budgets, some big companies are insisting on flat-fee payments instead of law firms’ long-standing practice of the “billable hour.”

City “water cops” are handing out citations to people caught wasting water resources in drought-stricken areas.

Lumber mills that produce woods for hardwood floors and maple cabinets have been devastated by the U.S. recession’s double whammy: the housing bust and unavailable credit.

Some hospitals find that owning up to medical errors reduces litigation and helps them learn from their mistakes.

Despite a 25-year effort to improve U.S. education, the latest high-school SAT exam scores are disappointing. Asian-American students are thriving but the SAT gap for blacks and Hispanics widens.

More than half of Somalia’s population needs humanitarian aid, the U.N. says.

Software makers are scrambling to develop cell phone safety applications that prevent texting while driving.

Inexpensive mini-reactors may be an alternative to building giant nuclear powerplants, though there are technical, financial and regulatory hurdles.

“Advocates for alternative energy are discovering that water issues may prove to be as important a selling point for the industry as reducing carbon-dioxide emissions,” according to an article headlined “Water Worries Shape Local Energy Decisions,” in The Wall Street Journal (26 March 2009).

Especially in the western U.S., where water can be scarce, communities are turning to wind farms or solar arrays — which have minimal water needs — instead of building traditional power plants that consume more water.

The electric-power industry accounts for nearly half of all water withdrawals in the U.S., with agricultural irrigation coming in a distant second at about 35%. Even though most of the water used by the power sector eventually is returned to waterways or the ground, 2% to 3% is lost through evaporation, amounting to 1.6 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons a year that might otherwise enhance fisheries or recharge aquifers, according to a Department of Energy study.

The study concluded that a megawatt hour of electricity produced by a wind turbine can save 200 to 600 gallons of water compared with the amount required by a modern gas-fired power plant to make that same amount.

Twitter: RT @mitchbetts Solar & wind farms have another advantage over traditional power plants: They use a lot less water. http://bit.ly/1a4GCx

For years the conventional wisdom has been to plow money into 401(k) plans for retirement. Anyone who didn’t was considered a financial dunce. Well, so much for conventional wisdom. The 401(k) system has “serious shortcomings,” says The Wall Street Journal (“Big slide in 401(k)s spurs calls for change,” 8 January 2009). Employees have seen their retirement accounts drop, 20%, 30%, 44% in the economic downturn.

“This is the biggest test that the 401(k) plan has seen to date, and it has failed,” says Robyn Credico, head of defined-contribution consulting at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, noting that many baby boomers are ready to retire. “We’ve put people close to retirement in a very challenging position.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

[E]ven when workers make good choices, a market meltdown near the end of their working careers can still blow their savings to smithereens.

“That seems like such a fundamental flaw,” says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. “It’s so crazy to have a system where people can lose half their assets right before they retire.”

The U.S. Congress is beginning to take a look at retirement and 401(k) policy, starting with an October 2008 committee hearing with a variety of witnesses.

Some proposed setting up “universal” retirement accounts, which would cover all workers. One such plan called for establishing accounts that would receive annual contributions from the federal government, and would offer a guaranteed, but relatively low, rate of return. Another proposed automatically investing contributions in an index fund that holds stocks and bonds, with the mix getting more conservative as workers approach retirement.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, recently issued the following principles for future 401(k) reform:

• Expose excess fees that Wall Street middlemen take from workers accounts.
• Bring young and low-wage workers into the system at a higher rate through automatic enrollment for employers already offering 401(k)s.
• Ensure that retirement accounts have diversified investment options with low fees, including low-cost index funds.
• Ensure workers have access to reliable independent investment advice.
• Reduce vesting periods and improve portability of 401(k) accounts.

But is this just minor tinkering with a system still dependent upon the wildly fluctuating stock market (not much different from gambling)? Do we need more radical reform that provides a solid financial foundation for retirement?

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Related:

• Are Retirement Savings Too Exposed to Market Risk?
• The failure of our 401(k)s
• Deloitte white paper, 2007: Future of 401(k)s (.pdf)

For Twitter: RT @mitchbetts “OK, the 401(k) retirement system didn’t work. What’s next?” http://tinyurl.com/7mp2j5

The following are the top five R&D metrics used by industry (2008):

1. R&D spending as a percentage of sales (77%)
2. Total patents filed/pending/awarded/rejected (61%)
3. Total R&D headcount (59%)
4. Current-year percentage sales due to new products released in the past six years (56%)
5. Number of new products released (53%)

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Source: Goldense Group Inc.’s 2008 Product Development Metrics Survey
Base: 200 companies that design and develop new products
Discovered via ThomasNet’s Industrial Market Trends

A few corporate boards are using scenario planning to better prepare for crises. For example, Reynolds American Inc. held a mock board meeting in July that simulated the death of the chairman and CEO in a plane crash.

During the simulation, the HR chief made a presentation about possible successors, as well as the need to communicate with the press, regulators, investors and employees. The two-hour simulation exposed gaps in Reynolds’ emergency-succession plan. The board found it easier to air such issues “without the intense emotion of facing the [actual] loss of a CEO,” board member Betsy Atkins says. “We ended up feeling better prepared.”

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Source: “Anticipating Corporate Crises,” The Wall Street Journal, 23 September 2008

Five developments that caught my eye:

• For the first time in America’s recent history, future generations may be worse off economically than their parents, warns economist Ross Gittell at the University of New Hampshire.
• China influences global public opinion by paying 300,000 people to post comments in online message boards.
• State laws requiring smoke-free casinos are hurting casino revenues. “Even relatively quick smoke breaks interrupt the in-the-zone mentality critical to keeping gamblers in play.”
• Spain is paying jobless immigrants to go home, in an attempt to cut social services spending.
• Gasoline demand in the U.S. may have reached its peak in 2007, because Americans are driving less and demanding greater fuel efficiency as a result of sustained high prices, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Many large U.S. companies have their products manufactured in China — no surprise there. But “the huge surge of goods arriving on our shores from China and elsewhere in Asia could easily overwhelm the infrastructure that receives and distributes them,” writes veteran consultant George Stalk.

Stalk — in his book “Five Future Strategies You Need Right Now” (Harvard, 2008) — calls this phenomenon the “China riptide” and makes this prediction:

The West Coast ports of the U.S. will reach their combined container unloading & loading capacity as early as 2010.

One researcher calls the ports “the choke valve” of global commerce.

The first serious indication of of trouble was a 2002 lockout of dockworkers that “snarled the nation’s supply chain, and cost the economy billions of dollars,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Then, in 2004, “operations at the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach nearly ground to a halt” because they couldn’t keep up with the surge of arriving containers. “Almost 100 ships lay at anchor waiting for berths, and then languished for days before they could be unloaded,” Stalk writes.

The problem will only get worse, because the amount of goods arriving in containers from Asia, especially China … is growing so fast — at 9 to 12% a year — that even the world’s fleet of monster container ships cannot keep up with the increase.

Labor slowdowns at West Coast docks had supply chain managers worried again this year, the Journal reported recently (26 July 2008), until a labor contract was ratified.

The Journal said a study by Stephen Cohen, a professor of regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley, called the West Coast ports “the choke valve in the flow of commerce that defines a globalized economy.”

The evolution of a just-in-time global-supply chain, he wrote, has resulted in “a shipping system capable of operating at huge scale and stop-watch scheduling but at the cost of concrete inflexibility.” Trying to reroute cargo, at least in the short term, is simply too difficult and costly for many shippers, he said.

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Related: Just In Case: The 9/11 terrorist attacks shattered many supply chain managers’ devotion to the strategy known as just-in-time (JIT) inventory.

Bruce Temkin, an analyst and blogger at “Customer Experience Matters,” provides a thoughtful set of definitions, below:

• customer experience: the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization
• the perfect customer experience: a set of interactions that consistently exceeds the needs and expectations of a customer
• customer experience management (CEM): the discipline of increasing loyalty by exceeding customers’ needs and expectations

There are three key elements of CEM:

• discipline (ongoing activities, not slogans)
• increasing loyalty (for profitability, not altruism)
• customers’ needs and expectations “CEM is not about technology deployments or internal milestones. It needs to be calibrated from the perspective of target customers.”

The last phrase is worth repeating: “…from the perspective of target customers.” I’ve long maintained that good customer service occurs when the organization sees things from the customer’s perspective — OK, from my perspective!

Temkin warns that improving the customer experience is hard work. “CEM is easier to define than to do,” he says. You can download his (free) 11-page PDF booklet titled: “The Six Laws of Customer Experience.”

We know about cell-phone-addled drivers, and wireless headset users who appear to be talking loudly to no one in particular. Now we have people typing furiously into their cellphones, BlackBerries and iPhones — heads down — and smacking right into poles or walls or other people.

Update: Forecaster Paul Saffo calls them “pedtextrians.”

A Chicago emergency room sees victims of texting incidents nearly every day, according to a Wall Street Journal article (25 July 2008). The fallen texters are prone to facial injuries, because they tend to hold the devices so close to their faces that their hands are less likely to break their fall. The common result: scraped chins, noses and foreheads (and broken glasses).

In London, some lamposts were outfitted with padded bumpers to cut down on injuries to errant texters (though it was a publicity stunt).