2 Million 99ers Scream Hard Recovery for The Jobless

Submitted by EconMatters on 07/24/2011 21:19 -0400
By EconMatters


Scanning the news headlines, the hits seem to just keep on coming on the jobs front. The nationwide unemployment rate increase to 9.2% from 9.1% over the month. The unemployment rate also increased in 28 out of 50 states in June. California, Florida and Nevada — the three states that were hit hard by the housing bubble — all had unemployment rates still well over 10%.

The New 99ers

The more disturbing numbers are coming from the long-term unemployment. Nationally, the average duration of jobless in America shot up to 39.9 weeks as of June, or about 10 months, which is a record high since the BLS started tracking the data in 1948.



A year after the official end of the recession, the percentage of the long term unemployed (out of work for 27 weeks or more) now stood at 44.4% (or 6.3 million people) of the total jobless, up from the 43.1% level last June. Those out of work for a year or longer jumped to around 4.4 million, or 30.3% of all unemployed.

Moreover, #ac44ff; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-t ... 06143.html ">more than two million (2,039,000) Americans (over 14% of the unemployed, up from 9% in 2010) have been out of work for 99 weeks or longer. Huffington Post reported that this is the first time since the 99 week statistic has been tracked by the BLS that it has exceeded the two million mark.

Low Odds Landing a Job

A recent #ac44ff; http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils89.pdf ">BLS study noted that the chance that a person who had been unemployed for less than 5 weeks would become employed within a month was about 30% in 2010. For those unemployed 27 weeks or more, that probability dropped drastically to only 10%. Furthermore, 11% of the job seekers took a year or more to land another job in 2010, a huge leap from 3% in 2007.



Nearly 5 Job Seekers For Every Opening

The elevated long-term unemployment could be partly attributed to the fact that there are 4.7 unemployed workers in May for every job available, i.e. 13.9 million jobless competing for 3.0 million job openings. The ratio was the same as in April and has never risen above 4-to-1 for nearly 2.5 years, whereas in the 2001 recession, the ratio never exceeded 2.8-to-1, according to the #ac44ff; http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/7295/ ">Economic Policy Institute.

How Many New Jobs Does the U.S. Need?

Brooking Institute estimates the June “job gapâ€