Job Seekers Face a Slowing Market
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – The line outside the Los Angeles area Hilton hotel meeting room was long. Populated by men and women of all ages and styles of dress, the line of people stretched through a lobby area and doubled back on itself as job seekers waited their turn too get into a career fair.
“I’ve been looking for work for eight months now,” said Leslie DeGeorge.
An elegant blonde in a blue suit who lives in El segundo, she worked as a Hollywood prop master for 30 years until february, when the show where she was employed was not renewed.
“I thought, I don’t know if this business is going to keep supporting us. Let’s figure out a pivot,” DeGeorge said of herself and her husband, who also worked on a now-canceled Hulu show, and who have struggled to find jobs in their field since last year’s writers and actors strikes.
“I am open,” she said, after dropping off her resume with a nonprofit that provides counseling for troubled youth. “I’m doing this career-change pivot. I have to. I mean, nobody’s hiring prop masters.”
With the job market slowing,Americans’ views of their personal finances are down 13% as the start of 2025,with 65% of consumers polled by the University of Michigan in September saying they expect unemployment to increase in the coming year – almost double the number who said so a year ago. Consumers’ expectations of personal job loss have steadily grown since March, the consumer sentiment survey reported Friday.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this month that 22,000 non-farm payrolls jobs were created in August – far lower than many economists