It was a bad year for the American worker with investment bankers, toy store employees and aluminum manufactures among the millions of employees who lost their jobs in the past 12 months.
(ABC)
The government says that more than 11 million Americans are now unemployed. And another 8 million are under-employed, working part-time because they cannot find full-time work. The pain is extraordinarily widespread.
"Many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold," President-elect Barack Obama said during a speech on the economy Wednesday.
And many investors on Wall Street look toward Obama to see how exactly his proposed stimulus plan "will save or create at least 3 million jobs over the next few years," as he says.
How he will do that is not yet clear. Obama said he plans to invest in energy, education, health care and new infrastructure.
"We will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced -- jobs building solar panels and wind turbines; constructing fuel-efficient cars and buildings and developing the new energy technologies that will lead to even more jobs, more savings and a cleaner, safer planet in the bargain," Obama said Wednesday.
But, in the meantime, a growing number of Americans are collecting unemployment and desperately searching for new jobs, ones that pay close to what they used to make.
Beyond that, fear of layoffs is taking its own toll on the economy. Some workers who still draw a weekly paycheck are cutting back on their spending for fear of losing their job down their road. While they might be saving for that rainy day, their lack of spending is driving the country deeper into a recession and putting their own jobs in jeopardy.
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