When you’re looking at government-compiled employment numbers, Carolina Journal editors have explained it’s important to dig beneath the surface.
Bloomberg Businessweek follows that suggestion in its latest issue. A featured article looks into the highly publicized reports of 8.3 percent unemployment nationwide.
[Hugh] Bailey [of the Washington Employment Services Department] and his crew are part of the nationwide struggle to do something about the long-term unemployed—technically defined as out of work more than 27 weeks—as well as those discouraged Americans who have stopped looking for work. Together these two groups constitute some 6.6 million people. Because many have stopped seeking employment, the latest jobless figure of 8.3 percent paints a rosier picture than exists. The recent drop in unemployment hasn’t done much to boost the portion of the population participating in the labor force: 63.7 percent, the lowest level in three decades.
Many workers have given up hope. More than half the long-term unemployed are pessimistic about finding a job in the near future, according to the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, which has been tracking 1,202 jobless since August 2009. That number jumps to 85 percent for those who’ve exhausted their unemployment insurance. People who have been unemployed for more than two years say they’ve cut back on food, health care, and housing expenses, according to the Heldrich Center, and 60 percent reported selling possessions. A similar number said they’d borrowed money from family or friends. A third took on more credit-card debt. Four in 10 used food stamps or went to a food bank.
This is the grim backdrop to Washington’s six-month-old effort to lower its own high unemployment rates: 10.4 percent for the city as a whole, as of December, and 24.8 percent in the city’s impoverished Ward 8.
