this point:
Quote:
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.
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is the jumpoff for this article from the march issue of atlantic:
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America - Magazine - The Atlantic
the basic point is that the economic transition/crisis, the primary function of which from the outset was to be something that was declared to be over, is both revealing the consequences of the longer-term restructurings of the manufacturing sector and through the tightening of commercial credit, creating new and improved employment problems at the same time. but the unnerving aspect of what is surfacing-to-view is that this "recovery" appears to be "jobless" in the sense that....well, that's what the article is about and it's worth reading.
what do you think of this piece?
does it describe the economic situation in your geographical area?
has this affected you directly? how are you managing? how are people around you managing who are affected if you are not?
what do you make of the history leading to this "jobless recovery" business?
what do you think can or should be done to generate more work for more people?