America’s Jobs Crisis: “Ceasing to Exist”

That it is not. It does show that an economic recovery is taking hold – but not fast enough to blot out the perception and the devastating reality of the vast joblessness scourging American society.

In addition, the substantial decline in the unemployment rate for whites, to 8.5 percent has again thrown into sharp relief that the unemployment rate for Latinos remains in the 13 percent range, and that of Blacks at nearly astonishing 16 percent. 

President Obama, speaking at a window factory in Maryland, acknowledged that unemployment has only begun to recover from an economic crisis that has been “the worst in our lifetime” and promised that “we will not rest until we have fully recovered from this recession and we have reached that brighter day.”

The muted reaction stems from the fact that job creation continues to be very modest: the 1.3 million jobs that were created last year is far short of the number needed just to keep pace with the number of new entrants into the workforce, let alone produce the kind of job growth that marks an expanding economy.

Those two statistics alone point to a simple, destructive dynamic: large numbers of Americans are disappearing.

No, this isn’t the plot of a science fiction movie or novel. It is the work of the economic dynamo now known as the Great Recession, which since December 2007 has stripped the American workplace of more than 8 million jobs. Citing that figure alone, however, significantly understates the problem. Because the labor market during that period also failed to create enough jobs to keep pace with the growth in the working-age population, the actual jobs gap is now about 11 million jobs. Those two forces have pushed the number of jobless Americans to 15 million people.

The grimmer fact buried within that giant number is that nearly half of them – some 6 million – have been jobless for more than six months; and nearly 2 million of that group have fruitlessly hunted for work for a year or more.

These are the Americans who are disappearing. Their jobs have ceased to exist, and so – because work anchors most people to the civic life of their local communities and the larger society – they, too, are effectively ceasing to exist, vanishing like dust in the wind.

That is the conclusion one can draw from a large, ever-accumulating stack of reports and articles charting the economic and psychological havoc long-term unemployment is creating among millions of Americans.

The most recent is the latest in a series of reports that has tracked the predicament of one group of out of work Americans since 2009, when the Great Recession was at its fiercest.

Conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, the current report, is gloomily titled “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in Their Futures,” (PDF) It shows that the crisis of long-term unemployment is impoverishing both the spirit and the pocketbooks of those held in its grip.

In other words, the new study in title and in substance fully lives up to the dire forecast of its predecessor the Center published last April, “No End in Sight: The Agony of Prolonged Unemployment.”

The conclusion of “A Shattered Dream” puts its findings in the plainest terms.

• “It is hard to overstate the dire shape of the unemployed. Over the space of the 15 months … just one-quarter have found full-time jobs. And virtually all of those jobs were for less pay or benefits …”
• “For those who remain unemployed, the cupboard has long been bare … Eighty percent report having given up something formerly fundamental to their lives in one of the areas of food, housing, or health.”
• “The unemployed are living lives of downward economic mobility. [And] they manifest an air of resignation to their fates. By a margin of almost two to one, more feel they will not return to their former financial position than will. The vast majority do not simply say they have less in savings and income than they did a few years ago, but that they have a lot less.”
• “One of the casualties of the Great Recession has been a core American principle … that if people work hard and play by the rules, they can get ahead. Now, the majority of the unemployed do not believe that simple hard work will guarantee success. They feel powerless, and voice little confidence in the government’s ability to help them.”

The Heldrich Center reports and other similar documents have an even broader applicability. They illuminate the scope of the crisis of mass high unemployment – and the social ills it created and exacerbated — that has afflicted black America as a whole and poor black Americans in particular since the early 1970s.

In those four decades the unemployment rate for blacks on an annualized basis has rarely dipped below 10 percent. Compare that reality with the fact that as harsh as the jobs environment has been these last three years, the unemployment rate for whites has never been above 10 percent.

In other words, comparing two crises of mass high unemployment, and the great racial disparity in unemployment still at a work now, underscores that persistent mass joblessness is not due to a deficit of "personal responsibility" among the jobless, but simply a lack of the opportunity to work.  

And the continuing crisis of the poor Blacks also shows that long-term unemployment often brings with it perhaps the most devastating consequence of all: In the eyes of the larger society, you cease to exist.