Tech job market slumps

SEATTLE — Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago have confirmed what many high-tech workers have long suspected: The job market for technology experts remains bleak, years after the U.S. recession officially ended in late 2001.

The nation’s information technology industry lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001, when the recession began, and April of this year, the researchers found.

Perhaps more surprising, just over half of those jobs — 206,300 — were lost after experts declared the recession over in November 2001.

In all, the researchers said, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500, between March 2001 and April 2004.

Researchers Snigdha Srivastava and Nik Theodore compiled the numbers using the Current Employment Statistics survey and the Current Population Survey. The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, was conducted for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle organization that wants to unionize workers at Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies.

Theodore, a professor and director of the university’s Center for Urban Economic Development, said one factor in the staggering high-tech job losses is the familiar lament that businesses have been wary to hire because of uncertainty over how much the economy is improving.

But he also attributes some of the job losses to corporations farming high-tech jobs out to overseas companies that promise to do such highly skilled work for lower wages.

He said the study shows that high-tech workers “are really bearing the brunt of economic restructuring strategies.”