It’s like the 2008 financial meltdown all over again – only worse.

New York state will lose hundreds of thousands of well-paid back-office, finance, tech and manufacturing jobs over the next 48 months, according to new data reviewed by The Post.

But instead of Wall Street in free-fall, this job loss is caused by slow growth, labor-saving technology and lower-cost competitors overseas and out of state.

New York has recovered all the jobs it lost during the Great Recession. But these replacements are lower-paying jobs just above minimum wage and with reduced benefits, analysts say.

“I know one very profitable company in New York that’s not replacing staff once employees quit or retire,” Honorio Padrón, principal at The Hackett Group, a global strategic advisory firm, told The Post.

He’s describing a Fortune 500 company, but he declined to name it. And, he says, it’s one of many shipping scores of back-office jobs overseas.

“These employees won’t be replaced in New York, because of the high costs of doing business here,” added Padrón. The pay for these local jobs averages nearly $80,000 annually, Padrón says.

New York is at the epicenter of a wider bloodbath – a staggering 1.85 million back-office jobs projected gone from North America from 2002 to 2017, hundreds of thousands of them in New York, according to new research by The Hackett Group. Blame it on offshoring and economic fundamentals like tepid growth and technological efficiencies, it says.

The data make grim reading. New York state lost nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the five years through 2012. That’s a gut-wrenching drop of 16.9 percent, compared with a national average of 14.1 percent, according to the Office of the Comptroller.

And since 2008, the state has shed a total of 182,000 middle- and higher-wage jobs paying as much as $70,000 a year and up, according to another economic analysis.

For the 12 months ended June 2013, manufacturing employment rose modestly across the nation, but declined in New York by 3.6 percent year-over-year.

After one of the worst decades on record for manufacturing jobs – a record 294,000 jobs lost, or 39 percent of the total – the current decade looks like it may be a repeat disaster.

And IBM recently said it was moving hundreds of jobs from Rochester to Mexico.

…read more
Source: NY Post

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