It seems to me, there are two main factors leading to this “jobless recovery” in the US.
One, technology has driven productivity gains that have been making steady progress for a long, long time. This means that even as demand begins to increase, businesses will still be able to fill this demand without any need to add workers to the payroll.
Two, although the shift to cheaper labor overseas is certainly not a new phenomenom, with each business that finds it must resort to finding cheaper labor to remain solvent, more business are in turn forced to consider the same decision. For quite some time there has been the temptation for US businesses in the manufacturing sector to tap the virtually unending supply of cheap labor overseas, but more and more, there is also a huge increase in educated laborers available from India and Southeast Asia, ready to fill jobs in the technology sector at a fraction of the cost - jobs that used to seem as if they were safely in the hands of workers in the West.
Any ideas as to some conrete steps that could be taken to stem (in the words of Ross Perot during the NAFTA debate) “that sucking sound” of jobs going across the borders and overseas?
