Scenes from the front lines as the U.S. economy stalls and companies shrink or disappear altogether:

In New York, thousands of job seekers waited two hours in the cold last week to pass along resumes and talk to company recruiters gathered at a job fair. Standing patiently in line, a former hedge fund analyst said he’s optimistic he’ll find work in finance because he’s willing to relocate.

Nearby, a guy laid off a month ago from the Plaza Hotel said he’s losing faith. It’s his third job fair in as many weeks, and the lines are just getting longer.

Some laborers across 33rd Street took a break from unloading trucks at the Empire State Building. Shaking his head, one expressed profane gratitude for the job he had.

Twenty-four hours and two hundred miles away on the outskirts of Harrisburg, Pa., a similar scene played out, but the narrative was different.

Attendees at this job fair were sparse and there was an abundance of empty recruiting tables -- empty because Central Pennsylvania employers aren’t sure they’ll be hiring anytime soon.

Thomas Easter, 23, explained why he braved a miserable rain to attend the Harrisburg event: “I was working for a ‘temp’ agency but I got laid off in September. They don’t have any work. It’s getting slow,” he said.

Is it ever.

No sector is safe from cuts. Banking is probably the hardest hit, a point emphasized by Citigroup’s (C) announcement on Monday that it was laying off an additional 52,000 employees. Goldman Sachs (GS) has told 3,200 employees they’ll be let go, and Morgan Stanley has also shed thousands.

Retail and technology may soon be catching up to banking. Electronics retailer Circuit City has filed for bankruptcy and is slashing 6,800 jobs, and computer maker Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is cutting as many as 6,000 workers because sales have plummeted amid the global economic slowdown.

Those examples just scratch the surface. The national figures are alarming and growing worse by the day.

The U.S. lost 1.2 million jobs through October, with over half of them disappearing after Aug. 1, according to the U.S Department of Labor. The unemployment rate stands at a14-year-high of 6.5%, and many economists expect the figure to hit 8% by 2010.

No wonder a man who was making six figures at a hedge fund a month ago is willing to stand in line for hours on a chilly November morning to pitch himself for a job he knows won’t pay anywhere near his former salary.

He and thousands of others in similar circumstances waited last week to meet with recruiters gathered at a job fair held at a midtown hotel and organized by online job site Monster.com.

“I don’t think they’ll be offering anything significant in terms of salaries anymore,” said the former analyst, who asked not be identified by name.

Craning his neck to view the line in front of and behind him, the analyst assessed the situation. “I didn’t expect this,” he said. “I must say, this is pretty horrible.”

A few feet away an unemployed hotel worker recalled a similar experience two weeks ago, when thousands lined up outside a fancy hotel on 5^th Avenue to apply for about 200 jobs.

“You have to do everything you can just to get one call back,” said the hotel worker, who claimed to have brought 35 resumes to last week’s event.

A veteran of long job fair lines, the hotel worker said the worst event he had attended so far was a recruiting fair a few weeks earlier at another midtown Manhattan hotel where potential employees, after waiting in line for hours, were told they could only fill out applications. No interviews would be conducted.

“I could have done that online,” the man observed, archly.

A few hours later, a man leaving the fair complained that many of the companies recruiting inside offered what amounted to entry level sales jobs, positions whose salaries depended heavily on commissions.

The man said he had been laid off by a “big financial services firm downtown” in October and that he was “nervous but not frightened” about his prospects.

In any event, pride and a $2,650-a-month Greenwich Village rent precluded him from accepting a low-level sales job, he said.

“I waited 90 minutes to get in (to the job fair) and stayed four minutes,” he said.

In Harrisburg, Pa., the following day, event organizer Lisa Spriggs said she’s been finding it increasingly difficult to get Central Pennsylvania companies to participate in her recruitment fairs.

“Most of the companies we’ve worked with are holding back because they don’t know which way they’re going to go,” she said.

In other words, many companies in her region aren’t recruiting because they can’t afford to hire new employees.
Spriggs said the end of the presidential election could benefit upcoming events because the uncertainty of who’s going to win is gone. With a new president elected and his tax programs taken into account, companies can ostensibly plan their budgets accordingly, she said, and perhaps consider hiring.

But that remains to be seen.

After several months of ‘temp’ work came to an abrupt end in September, Easter said he attended the Harrisburg event hoping to avoid a minimum wage job at a fast food restaurant.

“Even those are getting harder to find,” he said.

He spoke to several recruiters for career training programs, and filled out applications with package delivery company UPS, as well as Securitas, a global security firm. He was not optimistic.

“I’d like to work on computers,” he said. “But I’ll take anything to get me above water.”