2010: unemployment

2010 was the worst year for jobs since the Great Depression. The year's average unemployment rate will clock in at about 9.7 percent—higher than last year's 9.3 percent and tied for the highest annual rate since the government started keeping official counts in 1948. For all of 2010, in any given month, about 15 million Americans—the population of New England—were looking for work. And, really, in any given month, more needed work. Underemployment—that's the "official unemployed," plus people in part-time or temporary positions looking for full-time work, plus people discouraged from the labor market and no longer looking—totaled as many as 25 million.

And the recession has not meant just more joblessness. It has also meant longer joblessness. The average length of a spell of unemployment now sits at 30 weeks, after hitting a high of 35 weeks in July. About 6.3 million people, 42 percent of all unemployed Americans, have been out of work for more than six months. And more than 1 million have exhausted their unemployment benefits. They're called 99ers. (The term, coined this year, refers to the maximum weeks of benefits in the states with the highest unemployment rates.) There are about 1.6 million of them, according to the Department of Labor. And they raise the question: What happens when unemployment insurance ends?

via www.slate.com

Comments

[Steven Sherman]

The question of the 99ers raises the question of another group that is difficult to count. When people's benefits run out, they may take jobs well below their skill level, and the pay they are accustomed to. If you go from writing software to being a stock clerk at Target, you are officially employed, but something appears wrong here.