More than 5,000 New Yorkers Tuesday braved the cold in hopes of finding new work amid rising job cuts.

Women For Hire held a career fair from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in Manhattan on the day. Throngs of hopefuls lined up for the event. And for the first time, the organizer opened the career fair to men.

Founded in 1999, Women For Hire, offers a wide variety of career-related information and videos geared to working women, and an online job board that helps leading employers connect with top-notch professional women in all fields, according to its website.

According to Women for Hire, 41 companies offered 1,000 openings to be filled at Tuesday's job fair. At the last such event in November just 1,500 people attended.

The job fair was open to men this year because of the severity of the financial crisis and an influx of inquiries, said Tory Johnson, Women for Hire's chief executive.

On Tuesday figures from The Conference Board, a non-profit global business organization, showed that more consumers say that jobs are "hard to get," more expect less jobs to be available and fewer expect their incomes to rise any time soon. Some economists have predicted that unemployment could rise by another 700,000 this month.

On Jan. 30, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a new budget for the fiscal year starting on July 1 that includes heavy cuts in city jobs. The plan calls for a reduction of almost 23,000 jobs through layoffs and attrition.

Media reports quoted Bloomberg as saying recently that the city is projected to lose nearly 300,000 jobs through 2010.

According to a UBS bank report published recently, with job losses accelerating in financial services and more spillover impact still to come, unemployment may approach the previous peak of 10.5 percent recorded in 1976.

Source:Xinhua