The US Labor Department declared that the
unemployment rate has dropped to 8.2 percent. While economists applaud
the latest news, the reality is improvement comes only after 3 million
jobless Americans are unaccounted for.
While job creation exceeded expectations for January, those
experiencing long-term unemployment — those jobless for longer than six
months, that is — remains at a record high.
In a new report from
the Pew Charitable Trusts, it’s revealed that those suffering the
longest from the unemployment epidemic exceed any monthly statistic
dating back to the World War II. The Labor Department figures that
5.5 million would-be workers have been without employment for 27 weeks
or longer, accounting for around 42.9 percent of the total tally of
unemployed Americans.
The consulting firm Hamilton Place
Strategies based out of Washington estimates that as many as 3 million
additional unemployed workers have been without jobs for just as long
but are not taken into consideration by the US government. For those, the Department of Labor simply stops counting them.
The government has also identified around 2.8 million Americans “marginally
attached” to the job market in January. Per their own definition, that
accounts for those who want to work and have looked for working during
the last year but have not concentrated their efforts on the job hunt
during the last month.
They are also not accounted for in the Labor
Department’s unemployment figure.
Speaking before the
US House of Representatives Committee on the Budget, Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the issue. He admitted that the US
economy “has been gradually recovering from the recent deep recession,” but called long-term unemployment figures still “particularly troubling.”
“More
than 40 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six
months, roughly double the fraction during the economic expansion of the
previous decade,” explained Bernanke. “We still have a long way to go before the labor market can be said to be operating normally.”
