Record number of young Americans jobless

Record number of young Americans jobless

CHICAGO
Tue Jan 26, 2010 7:30am EST

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, according to research released on Tuesday.

Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.

"Low-income and minority youth, who depended on part-time jobs as a significant stepping stone to future employment, have been forced out of the job market and economically marginalized," Herman Brewer of the Chicago Urban League said in a statement.

Overall, 26 percent of American teenagers aged 16 to 19 had jobs in late 2009, said the report, which was based on U.S. Census Bureau data. That figure is a record low since statistics began to be kept in 1948, the researchers said.

Employment counts the number of people with a job as a percentage of the entire work force. By contrast, the unemployment rate -- which stood at 10 percent in December in the United States -- does not include people who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work.

Joblessness was particularly rife among high school dropouts aged 16 to 24 who were neither in school nor holding a job, the report said. Family income also had a influence on joblessness.

Only 13 percent of low-income black teenagers in Illinois held a job in 2008 compared with 48 percent of more affluent white, non-Hispanic teens.

The "disconnection rate" -- Americans aged 20 to 24 who were neither in school nor working -- jumped to 28 percent last year from 17 percent in 2007.

"If you included those in prison it would be a couple of points higher," the report's co-author Joseph McLaughlin of Northeastern.

Among the proposals the report supported were government-funded jobs programs directed at the young, additional funding to help re-enroll school dropouts, and government-funded expansions of work internships.

(Reporting by Andrew Stern; Editing by Eric Walsh)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60P0Z620100126

Doesn't surprise me a bit. I know of a young man in college and he said he attempted to get a summer job framing houses but every single jobsite he went to had all Spanish speaking workers and no one was interested in hiring him.

I've been jobless in Charlotte since 10/2008. You have nooooooooooo idea how it sickens me to drive down the road and see vans filled with hispanics with plenty of work to do.

I was just looking at a federal job listing in Charlotte, I was thinking about applying for; until I saw the note (bilingual), and this was a Social Security Administration position.