"Millions of unemployed Americans are suffering economic and personal catastrophes. This is not your ordinary dip in the business cycle. Americans believe that this is the Katrina of recessions. Folks are on their rooftops without a boat. The water is rising, and many see no way out."
That's the director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, Carl Van Horn, speaking about a new survey, The Anguish of Unemployment:
A comprehensive national survey conducted among 1,200 Americans nationwide who have been unemployed and looking for a job in the past 12 months, including 894 who are still jobless, portrays a shaken, traumatized people coping with serious financial and psychological effects from an economic downturn of epic proportion. ...
The survey shows that the great recession of 2007-2009 may have long-lasting financial and psychological effects on millions of people, and therefore on the nation’s social fabric. Two thirds of respondents say they are depressed, over half have borrowed money from friends or relatives, and a quarter have skipped mortgage or rent payments. The survey gathered hundreds of verbatim comments from the unemployed, many of whom used raw, forceful language to describe harrowing financial and family problems.
The survey finds that 60% of the recently unemployed lost their jobs suddenly, without advance warning. Eight in ten got two week’s notice or less. Just 15% of the jobless received any severance, and virtually none were offered retraining. Three in four unemployed workers say the economic situation has had a major impact on them and their family.
Only 40% of the currently unemployed received unemployment insurance to help them weather the economic crisis and 83% of those who did receive aid are concerned that their benefits will run out before they find a job. Underscoring another important debate, only half of the jobless have health benefits.
In a story Monday, The New York Times puts some faces on some of the anguish catalogued in the Heidrich Center's survey by focusing on "discouraged workers." These are Americans without jobs who, thanks to changes in 1967 and 1994 in the gathering of statistics, are not included in the numbers most likely to make the headlines when official unemployment is tallied each month.
They were left out of the latest unemployment rate, as they are every month: millions of hidden casualties of the Great Recession who are not counted in the rate because they have stopped looking for work.
But that does not mean these discouraged Americans do not want to be employed. As interviews with several of them demonstrate, many desperately long for a job, but their inability to find one has made them perhaps the ultimate embodiment of pessimism as this recession wears on.
Discouraged workers? More like disposable workers. Unless, of course, you're Michelle Malkin or Chicago School economist Casey Mulligan, in which case they are unwilling workers.