This Week in Poverty: A Little Help for the Long-Term Unemployed?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/167955/week-poverty-little-help-long-term-unemployed

There are 12.5 million unemployed people still seeking work in the United States, and over 5 million of them have been looking for work for twenty-seven weeks or longer.

These are “the long-term unemployed,” and their prospects for finding employment or getting assistance are rapidly diminishing.



The long-term unemployed now make up over 40 percent of all unemployed workers, and 3.3 percent of the labor force. In the past six decades, the previous highs for these figures were 26 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.

Instead of helping these folks weather the storm and find ways to re-enter the workforce, our nation is moving in the opposite direction. In fact, this past Sunday, 230,000 people who have been looking for work for over a year lost their unemployment benefits. More than 400,000 people have now lost unemployment insurance (UI) since the beginning of the year as twenty-five high-unemployment states have ended their Extended Benefits (EB) program.

What makes the denial of this lifeline all the more absurd is the reason for it. As Hannah Shaw, research associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), writes, “Benefits have ended not because economic conditions have improved, but because they have not significantly deteriorated in the past three years.”

[LiveNudePolitics]

1. Longer term unemployed treated as unemployable.

As someone who has been plugging away at getting a "good" job, but forced to work part time at a lower wage, I wonder why the unfair hiring practices of corporations are not highlighted to a greater degree while unemployment rates are discussed. Not considering applicants who have not worked in a few years through no fault of their own is wrong, should be illegal, and is frankly UN-American.

I have been so close to getting hired at several companies over the last 4 years, only to be beaten out for the job by a younger, cheaper, ALREADY employed persons. It seems to me, that HR personnel and directors assume that it is your fault you were laid off, there must be something wrong with you, or else you would have a job currently, and they take you out of the equation. Is this fair? It is not. Not only an unfair practice, it is stupid to devalue experience because a job applicant had the misfortune to be caught up in an economic meltdown. I am in my late thirties now, I don't foresee the job market getting any easier for me, unless some hiring manager has the rare common sense to see my value as an employee, has nothing to do with my employment history. The fact that I have accepted lower paying jobs that I am over qualified for, instead of taking handouts from Uncle Sam, also serves to make me less attractive to Human Resources managers. This has spurred me to get my creative kicks and air my grievances on a blog www.livenudepolitics,com, which keeps me sane. I refuse to put myself into tens of thousands of dollars in debt, out of desperation, just to train for a new field I may not even find employment in.

[Lucky Luciano]

2. The far right of that graph is going in the right direction.

Europe anxieties will make people hesitant to hire though, so the trend on the right pointing down may not continue.

The U-6 unemployment number has been below 15% for the last two months which is an improvement.

[midnight]

3. Unemployment benefits should be financed via taxing the rich.... Their tax cuts over the last

decade is destroying the infrastructure of this country... It's inhumane to cut the infrastructure of our most fragile in our country....