Burson Marsteller CEO Mark Penn points out in Monday's Wall Street Journal that the current recession is unique in that there is a loss of "professional jobs," or white collar jobs, as opposed to blue collar jobs.

He writes:

We have safety nets for the chronically unemployed, for the fast-food workers let go (oddly they may be the only ones keeping their jobs in this recession), and for the manufacturing plants that have been shuttered. The stimulus will create construction jobs galore. But we have nothing for the tens of thousands of displaced advertising creatives and newspaper writers and editors that are among the newly unemployed. They can't build roads -- all they learned how to do was to write ads and draft editorials.

Penn goes on to say that the U.S. is "totally unprepared for this new phenomenon." The byline is the latest in his Microtrends column for the WSJ, named after his book, "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes."

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