The agony of long term unemployment: 80 Percent Of People Jobless Last Summer Still Out Of Work

Billions and billions for bankers and billions and billions for the War Machine and billions and billions for the insurance industry, but what do we have for workers? A substantial federal jobs program? Single payer health care? Unemployment benefits as long as you need them? Nope. We have: "Be patient. Let the market work its magic." In all honesty, until we relearn how to take to the streets and shut down the machine until we have a government for the people and not a government for the parasites, our Corporate Masters and their DC puppets will keep feeding us all the shit we are willing to eat. How much is enough?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20100504/cm_huffpost/562493

Just one in five people who were out of work last summer have found jobs since then.

Of more than a thousand unemployed people surveyed by Rutgers University researchers last August, just 21 percent had landed a job by March, a followup survey reveals. Two-thirds remained "unemployed" according to the government's definition -- the rest gave up looking for work altogether, either going to school or retiring early.

"It's a pretty grim study," said Cliff Zukin, one of the authors of the report at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers.

Here's how this grim finding looks graphically:



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http://blogs.marketwatch.com/fundmastery/2010/05/03/long-term-unemployment-soaring/

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The overall trend for unemployment will hopefully starting moving down, although it really has not budged much in the past few months. The issue presented in this chart (red line) is that the number of people who have been unemployed longest is moving up so rapidly.

In a short post accompanying the chart, Veronique de Rugy spelled out how dramatically this statistic has changed since 2008 :

…According to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last month, over 44.1% of unemployed workers (6.5 million workers) had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more; at the start of 2008, 18.3% of unemployed workers fell into this category. Importantly, these measures of unemployment exclude workers who want employment but were, for various reasons, not included in BLS’s unemployment calculations – an estimated 5.8 million workers…

If those additional 5.8 million workers were added to this chart, it would look positively scary.

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http://www.mlive.com/michigan-job-search/index.ssf/2010/05/new_report_shows_the_agony_of_long-term.html

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A new 53-page report from Rutgers University titled “No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment,” paints a grim picture for the long-term unemployed.

The study finds that recent economic growth “has done little to reach millions of skilled workers still adrift in the most severe period of prolonged joblessness in decades.”

The share of job-seekers who’ve spent more than seven months looking for work has jumped from 48% last August to 70% today, Rutgers finds. Eight in 10 people who lost jobs in the recession have yet to find new employment. Most of those who have found work have taken pay cuts and/or lost benefits; six in 10 of them say they took the job simply to make ends meet.

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My wife and I are both lomg term laid off. Both have degrees and a good work history.

It is estimated up to 400,000 long term unemployed every month will be exhausting all benefits by the end of this summer.

The jobs aren't coming back in numbers anywhere near what we need. It's a permanent ratcheting back of the economy, the new normal. And if the wealthy criminals that created this situation can convince enough of the perpetually comfortable class that the recovery is here then the long term unemployed will be ignored and/or forgotten, hopefully by the midterms.

to put in additional tiers.

There is going to be massive homeless and poverty unseen since the 1930s if Congress fails to act.

pass real financial reform and a strong public option.

People keep hearing about a recovery and the run up to the midterms will be all about how Obama turned the recession around. He certainly isn't out their pressuring anyone to help the folks who will remain unemployed or underemployed for the next decade at least.

who have exhausted all their EUI or are about to.

Higher, if you take account of those who have given up looking for work, or work part-time while looking for full time work.

on these people and if we have to follow the examples of workers in France or Greece or wherever, that's what we have to do. Emailing and blogging isn't going to get us what we want. Shutting down DC for a couple of days might.

They're just hording revenue so that they will not hire any other workers, or if they want to hire, just hire part-time workers.