The Long Slog: Out of Work, Out of Hope
Excerpt From The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2009 Article Link>>
As Bill Jacobs hunted fruitlessly for work nine months after his layoff, it dawned on him that those nine months might, themselves, be part of his problem.
One clue was the conversation the computer specialist had with a job recruiter this summer. “The first question was, ‘When did you get laid off?’ The next one was, ‘How come you haven’t had a job since then?’”
Nearly 15 million Americans are jobless, and the number is widely expected to remain high even as the economy slowly begins to recover. Part of the problem many of the unemployed face: the very fact that they have been out of work a long time.
About five million of the jobless are what economists class as “long-term unemployed,” people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. As challenging as it is for anyone to find a good job in this economy, it can be even harder for people out of work a long time.
Skills atrophy. Demoralization sets in and can become permanent. Some potential employers shy away.
Discouraged, some workers who have spent many months on the sidelines simply fade out of the work force, applying for union pensions or Social Security benefits they didn’t intend to take until much later, or trying to get in on other government programs such as Social Security disability benefits.
The probability that a laid-off worker will find a job grows smaller the longer people have been out of work, according to studies in the 1980s by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago. “Someone unemployed for six months is much less likely to find a job in the next month than someone unemployed for one month,” Mr. Katz says.
The problem today: The proportion of the unemployed who have been out of work for over 26 weeks, at one-third, is the highest since World War II.
Mr. Katz, Mr. Meyer and other researchers also have found that wages the laid-off can expect when they do find a new job also tend to be lower the longer they were without work.
Scott Thompson has an on-the-ground view of their prospects. He is president of Lexicon Staffing, a technology recruiting firm in Portland, Ore. Employers he deals with don’t ever explicitly say they are less interested in people who have been out of work for an extended period, “but their actions tell me exactly that,” Mr. Thompson says. “We will send two or three candidates for a job. More often than not, the guy who has recent experience up to last month is the guy that gets the interview.”
A growing number of long-out-of-work adults facing these odds appear to be giving up. The labor-force participation rate — the proportion of working-age people who either have jobs or are actively looking for one — was 65.5% in August. That was the lowest in 22 years, according to the Labor Department.
Tags: Contract Work, Employment, Engineering, Jobs, Lexicon Staffing, Scott Thompson, Unemployment