Prospects for the New Year: Jobs picture bleak

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The New Year’s season is ideally a time of cheerful hope for the future. But for many in the United States this year, it is the time to turn down the heater, scrimp on food for the family, and contemplate many more months of standing in unemployment lines.

Few communities have been immune to the current jobs crisis; it has hit people like an epidemic. In some areas, the recession has made a bad situation much worse. Some inner-city neighborhoods, like the mainly Puerto Rican and Black Fairhill section of Philadelphia, have been left with almost half the population jobless.

At the end of 2010, there were 14.5 million people officially unemployed in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while another 11.5 million were stuck in unwanted part-time jobs or had even “given up” looking for work.

The latter category is important in trying to make sense of the government report that unemployment fell to 9.4% in December after edging up to 9.8% the previous month. The “decline” largely reflects the fact that the government deducted from its unemployment figures the number of jobless people who are considered to have not “searched for work” during the month.

Almost 4 million U.S. workers “left the labor force” since the beginning of the economic recession—most of them, according to the BLS, because they were “discouraged” about looking for jobs. If those “discouraged” workers were added in, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 15 percent. Yet even that figure ignores part-time workers who cannot find full-time jobs; the real U.S. unemployment rate is probably over 19 percent.

It is easy to understand why many are discouraged. They are finding that decent jobs are almost non-existent. Often the jobs they do find offer lower wages than their old ones, and are insufficient to pay the bills.

The Philadelphia Inquirer in recent weeks has been running a series of profiles of unemployed workers in the region, which are often quite poignant. One of the people interviewed by the Inquirer was Donna Oxford, a B.K. Bangash / AP former administrative assistant who was laid off from an e-commerce company in December 2007. “These days,” Inquirer staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen wrote, “Oxford stacks a pile of job-research books on her kitchen table. Her house, outside Coatesville, is cheerful, but a plastic sheet covers her front door to keep out a draft.

“Between unemployment benefits and a part-time job at the YMCA, she earns no more than $175 a week, and she worries about how she’ll support her family. … ‘I haven’t paid the mortgage in a couple of months,’ she (Above) Vigil for the Unemployed, held at the Arch St. Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Nov. 10.

said. … ‘Yes, it’s sad that I’m going to be homeless soon,’ said Oxford, her voice catching, her eyes swelling with tears….”

Oxford, without a full-time job for over three years, has joined the ranks of the “long-term unemployed,” a category that is getting increasing acknowledgment in the (continued on page 9, in “Canada employs ‘human-rights’ group to disrupt Venezuela”)