One in Five Unemployed?
They are working part-time only because they’ve been unable to find full-time work. This involuntary army of what’s called “underutilized labor” has been hovering for months at about 15% of the workforce. Include the eight million who have simply given up looking, and the real unemployment rate is closer to 19%.
More on this unemployment reality in the WSJ.
Something that is prevalent in this economy — especially during the recent downturn — is structural unemployment. Some of the new jobs are ones that the average unemployed worker is not trained for. In years past, labor was more manual. A worker laid off from one manufacturing job could often find work in an unrelated factory doing something else. Now work is mental. People cannot easily retrain for jobs in the new economy.
That’s very true, Dr. Goodman…many figures often fail to take into account those who have become so discouraged that they have simply dropped out of the job market.
Devon, I think that’s why we’re seeing much greater enrollment in education and job training programs amonger older individuals.
Obama’s economic stewardship has been a disaster.
Our friend health care is actually on both sides of the very serious unemployment problem.
On one hand, we have seen a drastic decline in deaths from heart disease and stroke in men in their 50’s. I grew up at the end of the Mad Men era, and I remember older executives dropping like flies. This opened up new jobs all the way along the line, though granted it was a morbid way to do so.
On the other hand, the sheer wastefulness of our health system creates many jobs. In fact, a respected business writer named Michael Mandel maintains that health care has created over 80% of all new permanent living wage jobs in the last two decades.
Just to take one example — Blue Cross hires extra staff to audit medical charts so as to spend less on claims, and then Mayo Clinic has to hire extra staff to provide more data, and to badger the insurance company to get paid. I am in this business and I see it all the time.
Health care provides jobs are hard to automate and in many cases, impossible to offshore. (rather like the mortgage and construction industries, which provided so many new jobs when we had low unemployment.)
These ‘unproductive’ industries are a necessary ballast, I think, in the face of relentless automation and free trade and offshoring.
James K.Galbraith is well to the left of anyone who reads this blog, but all would benefit from his article on ‘Soft Budgets and the Keynsian devolution….What is the American model anyways”?
His position is that deficit spending and Medicare over-spending is actually propping us up, not holding us down.
This is really a depressing article. Talking heads love to point out how we are in a economic recovery, that assertion is incorrect. An interesting stat in the article is the “quit rate”.
The expansion of automation eliminates routine jobs and leaves mostly non-routine service and knowledge based jobs.
Let’s not forget that those underemployed people aren’t counted in the traditional unemployment numbers. Just because someone has a job doesn’t mean that things are going well for them.
Thought this might be a video worth watching http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5291756n
I agree with you Alex. But having a job you don’t like is surely better than having no job at all. Isn’t it?
How about outsourcing? When Americans desperately need jobs, these are being outsourced. Anytime you go into a grocery store, if you pay close attention, you will see how disproportionate the ratio is between the products made in China and those made here in America. How is this economy ever supposed to recover if we continue to let the big players walk all over us?