Long-term Jobless Dropping Out of Workforce

For Long-term Jobless, Odds of Finding Work Plummet

June 8, 2011

The Lookout - As we've written, long-term unemployment is at an all-time high. The average duration of joblessness has now reached 37.5 weeks, according to the government's May jobs report. And 6.2 million Americans have been unemployed for over half a year.

Indeed, with layoffs at relatively low levels, believe it or not, chronic long-term joblessness is fast-emerging as the central issue of our ongoing jobs crisis.

So it's worth taking a more granular look at the problem--something that a new Labor Department report does. It finds, among other things, that a person's odds of getting hired dramatically decrease the longer they've been out of the workforce.

Thirty percent of Americans who had been out of work for less than five weeks found new jobs last year, according to the report. But for those who had been jobless for more than six months, that figure plummeted to just over 10 percent. Nearly 19 percent of those people--categorized by the government as the long-term jobless--dropped out of the workforce altogether.

As we've noted, part of the problem is that employers are less likely to hire people who have been jobless for a while--even though it's often no reflection on their skills or attitude.

The report also found that the amount of time that the unemployed spend looking for work has skyrocketed since the Great Recession began. And that's true whether you're talking about those who eventually found work, or those who didn't, and ultimately gave up looking.

Successful job-seekers took 10 weeks, on average, to find work last year. In 2007, it was five weeks. Unsuccessful ones spent about 20 weeks on average, before giving up. In 2007, it was 8.5 weeks--less than half the 2010 amount.

In other words, people are now willing to spend many more hours job-hunting than they were during good times.

Perhaps that's a good thing, although there's some evidence that the very act of searching unsuccessfully for work increases the negative psychological effects of joblessness. What's not in doubt is that increasingly, the American labor market is moving toward a system of haves and have nots: those lucky enough to have secure jobs, and those who just can't get a foot in the door.