Jobs Matter
There’s plenty of reason to worry about the long-term unemployed. Plenty of evidence suggests that when a person stays unemployed for seven months or more, it becomes harder and harder for him or her to ever return to the workforce.
This is Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein’s blog. Full post is interesting.
I’ve heard the long-term unemployed face obstacles to finding a job. I wonder how much it is merely the impression that the jobless are slackers; versus actual deterioration in job skills. I wonder if researchers controlled for those with marginal skills to begin with how much being unemployed affects job skills. I’ve known people who tried to retire only to find their employer kept calling them to return to work part time Apparently their skills didn’t atrophy in a matter of mere months.
Seems like this is what Europe is going through.
The problem is exacerbated in the big-government states, like California and Illinois.
We’ll see how the unemployment reform experiments in some other states address this problem in the next 5 years or so.
I have witnessed this in the growing ranks of the of long-term unemployed. Skills and confidence fade and employers to not like to hire them.