2010 will be marked by several changes in the evolving relationship between those who work and those who pay to have work done, says Tamara Erickson, author of Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation.

The approaches companies use to respond to difficult business conditions don't only affect the company, they leave a lasting impression on the workers and their teen-age children, who draw conclusions for their career strategy based on their parents' experience.

In her view, prominent workplace trends throughout 2010 include:

You can't open a newspaper or scan a web site with seeing another item about corporate layoffs.

And while downsizing is clearly devastating for those being let go, it’s the survivors that often have the worst time of it.

Quite often, the still-employed, who by all rights should be grateful for having jobs, end up resenting their bosses, hampering their performance at the same time.

If people are fired for cause, you can always rationalize that they deserved it. But when it’s an equally qualified peer, the typical result for those left behind is a lot of emotional baggage, including fear, uncertainty, grief, guilt and mistrust.

Workforce experts call it layoff survivor’s syndrome.

What do a 60-something sales executive and a 59-year-old mental health worker have in common?

They’re among the growing legion of unemployed older workers who say the recession has put them on a path toward early retirement. Except, given their cost of living, they’re pretty sure that’s something they can’t afford to do.

Add to that the ambivalence about working for pay at a time when they thought they would be doing something else and you’ve got a major problem, suggests a recent study from Metlife entitled “Buddy, Can You Spare a Job?”

The holiday season is coming, but you can probably count on one hand the people you know who’ll be taking more than a few days off this Christmas.

The number would be much higher if you had friends from, say, Japan though. There workers enjoy 44 days paid vacation each year, the most generous entitlement out of all the countries surveyed by human resource consulting firm Mercer.

At 31 days a year, Canada is bringing up the rear, ahead of only Australia at 30 days, and the United States at 28, the Globe and Mail reports.

That thud you may have heard recently is the sound of women continuing to hit their heads on that invisible glass ceiling, according to recent research from the University of Illinois.

One key factor: Too many managers, regardless of gender, believe women have more family-work conflict than men

And this belief, mistaken though it is, leads supervisors to take a negative view of female employees' suitability for promotion and salary increases, maintains Jenny Hoobler, the professor who headed up the study.

Lost work time productivity because of depression and substance abuse in Canada is now estimated at $51 billion a year, says Bill Wilkerson, head of the Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health.

But even in a high-stress jobs like policing, the job itself is not the major source of stress, it’s “usually what is going on in the office,” he says.

The biggest source of workplace worries? Boredom, repetition, ludicrous deadlines, layoffs, restructuring, unsafe work environments, sexual harassment, and difficult personality types can all contribute to higher levels of stress.

Whether it starts with wage rollbacks, reduced workweeks or unpaid leaves of absence, being laid off is hard.

But being told you’re being downsized, when you’re really being fired, is much worse,

Too often, employers – either because it has a better ring to it, reduces the emotional pain, or implies that the decision actually had little to do with any one individual – prefer to characterize job loss as a lay off. 

With a recession that’s seen thousands of workers replace well-paying jobs with ones at or near minimum wage, is it time to boost minimum wage rates? 

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, roughly 5 per cent of Canadians works for minimum wage or less. But a great many more work for only a few cents more than the minimum, CCPA maintains.

And, students aside, most of these are displaced adults trying to support their families, or older workers looking to supplement their pension.

The recent increase in online job postings may mean that the worst of the recession is behind us, says the Conference Board of Canada.

The Board’s help wanted index, which measures the number of new jobs posted online, jumped in every province except PEI last month. It had dropped nearly 30 per cent over the past year as the number of new online job postings plunged during the recession.

That would be the good news.

All told, some 1.5-million people are unemployed right now, and roughly 20% of them have been out of work for six months or longer, according to Stats Canada.

Between the increase in job seekers and the reduction in the number of positions available, competition for even the least desirable jobs has become much steeper.

And it seems that many of these job seekers are willing to accept as little as half of what they were making before, as long as it gets them in the door.