I've been wondering how many of these jobs are just gone for good due to higher efficiency and permanently increased productivity? We assume most of the unemployment & underemployment is caused directly by the recession but I'm not so sure about that. It seems possible to me we had sort of a jobs bubble where companies were overstaffing and the recession just exposed this. If you lay off 20% of your staff and magically the other 80% pickup the slack what incentive is there to re-expand by 20%?<p>My theory is modern technology and communications have just made certain positions inherently more productive. I can think of a time not that long ago where I may have lost an hour a day driving back to my office just to check my e-mail. Now I do that throughout the day on my SmartPhone while working on other projects. For a less skilled job I look at how grocery stores now scan products by UPC. There goes the job of the 19 year old tagging every can of corn with a little price tag sticker. When you run out of corn your computer inventory (tracked by UPC) knows about it. You spend 30 seconds re-ordering more through a computer instead of 15 unproductive minutes on the telephone waiting for the supplier to take your order. If these scenarios are being repeated in different ways all over the economy I think we need to consider that the rise in worker productivity is permanent and these jobs are gone for good.