USA: unemployment by duration 2000 - 2012

from David Ruccio

source

The chart shows the failure of U.S. corporations to create enough jobs to bring the long-term unemployment level down to anything close to historical levels.

What the chart doesn’t show is the number of American workers who have been unemployed for three years or more: 649,000! The Wall Street Journal offers a bizarre interpretation of this number:

What may be more surprising than the number of people who have dropped out of the labor force, however, is the number that have stayed in. To count this “unemployed” the official Labor Department statistics, a person must want to work, be available to work and have actively searched for work in the past four weeks. That hundreds of thousands of people still meet those requirements after years of searching — and months or even years after cashing their final unemployment check — is in some sense a sign of confidence that better times still lie ahead.

Me, I take it as a sign that people are forced to have the freedom to work for a wage in order to purchase the necessities of life—and thus, even though current economic arrangements have failed them, they have yet to give up their membership in the Reserve Army of the Unemployed.

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