Prosperous times seem to be gone for the moment, and when we’ll see them again remains an open question. An exclusive Rockefeller Foundation/TIME survey conducted in late June indicates that an overwhelming majority of Americans, concerned about their financial situations and economic futures, are calling out for more government help.

Throughout the ranks of employed Americans today, very much including your U.S. citizen workforce near and far, there is a new set of worries, fears and concerns. These are not lurking or latent. They are manifest, and prevalent, right now. They do not result from your staffing practices, but they may in significant measure drive or redefine them.

You thought you had to play to those 18-29-year-old Gen Yers, giving them everything they want as they cherry pick your jobs and make arrogant demands? You do. But understand the difference between demands and expectations. Understand that this demographic, which a prestigious new study suggests is another depression-era generation in the making, is in its own way scared stiff:

• 49% of them say America was a better place to live in the 1990s
• 46% say America is a lot less financially secure now than a decade ago.

Women have become an increasingly potent component of the American workforce. Today the average working wife brings home over one third of her family’s income, while in 8.5 million households she has become the major breadwinner. Given these overall gains, it has been assumed that when women did leave the workforce, it was for non-economic reasons. That is changing.

A new Joint Economic Committee report, Equality in Job Loss, reveals that the 2001 recession was the first in decades during which women not only lost jobs, but also did not see their employment rates recover to their pre-recession peak. Families can no longer rely on women’s employment to help boost family income during a downturn. 

In a stormy economy such as this, prospective job candidates may hunker down, follow the unemployment stats and become cautious. They weigh risk with a heaver burden of proof on the other side of the scale. Their appetite for experimentation diminishes. “What I might gain” must more clearly trump “what I will lose.”

The movement of talent is a growing part of the reality of managing what is rapidly becoming a borderless workforce. A new paper by Manpower says that more people are living and working away from their home countries than ever before. Migration is seen as one of the defining global issues of the early 21^st century.