Unemployment Insurance
The Emergency Unemployment Compensation Expansion Act
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ranks of those unemployed for a year or more up sharply
46 percent of the 14.6 million unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or longer and about 31 percent were unemployed for 52 weeks or longer. . . 46 percent of the 14.6 million unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or longer and about 31 percent were unemployed
for 52 weeks or longer. . . Joblessness for a year or longer has increased regardless of educational attainment.
U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION – JANUARY 2011
Released February 4, 2011. [Excerpt below is related to longterm unemployment]
In January, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, up from 2.5 million a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 1.0 million discouraged workers in January, about the same as a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.8 million persons marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.)
Changes to data collected on unemployment duration.
Effective with data for January 2011, the Current Population Survey (CPS) was modified to allow respondents to report longer durations of unemployment. Prior to that time, the CPS accepted unemployment durations of up to 2 years; any response of unemployment duration greater than this was entered as 2 years. Starting with data for January 2011, respondents are able to report unemployment durations of up to 5 years. This change affects estimates of average (mean) duration of unemployment. The change does not affect the estimate of the number of unemployed persons and does not affect other data series on the duration of unemployment.There has been an unprecedented rise in the number of persons with very long durations of unemployment during the recent labor market downturn. Nearly 11 percent of unemployed persons had been looking for work for about 2 years or more in the fourth quarter of 2010. Because of this increase, BLS and the Census Bureau updated the CPS instrument to accept reported unemployment durations of up to 5 years. This upper bound was selected to allow reporting of considerably longer durations while limiting the effect of erroneous extreme values (outliers). [For the entire announcement, go here.]
The new upper bound of 5 years for reported unemployment duration is being phased in over the first 4 months of 2011, as the duration question is only asked of a portion of those unemployed in any given month. (The question is asked of unemployed persons who were not interviewed in the prior month and the newly unemployed. Duration is updated automatically for unemployed respondents who remain unemployed the following month.) By April 2011, all households will have been able to report the new duration upper limit.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/summary_10_10/ranks_unemployed_year.htm
http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RS22915_20101001.pdf
+++++ Ezra Klein, July 2010 “Here’s something most people don’t know about unemployment
benefits: They’re not flat across the country. The federal funding is tied to the unemployment rate. To get funds for 99 weeks of unemployment, a state’s unemployment rate has to be higher than 8 percent. Nebraska, with its low unemployment rate, isn’t eligible. Nevada, which is near 15 percent, is.”
Comment from above: “They refuse to understand economic theory, which advocates unemployment benefits as the most effective stimulus because the money gets spent immediately, thus diffusing it through the economy. They refuse to understand the electoral argument, that voters care more about the current overall state of the economy and don’t really care as much about the long-term deficit as polls and especially pundits would have us believe. They refuse to hear the humanitarian argument–that we who are well enough off shouldn’t let our follow citizens starve (I give to food banks in the Bay Area and Detroit and am willing to see my taxes go up a bit). They persist in the belief that there are jobs everywhere that just go begging and don’t seem to understand that demand has fallen so far with the bursting of the asset bubble and unemployment that we are in a downward spiral and businesses just aren’t hiring because things are bad. They won’t even listen to their own state governors who are pleading for help.”
+++++ Globalization: “Many U.S. jobs will continue to move overseas or be replaced by automation. The government estimates that an additional 1.2 million manufacturing jobs will vanish by 2018, on top of the 2.1 million factory jobs lost since the recession started in December 2007. Former Labor secretary Robert Reich says most of the jobs created won’t be very good ones …”
source: money.blogs.time.com
+++++ Loss of pub. sector jobs will push these workers into the private sector, thus pushing unemployment (U-6).
+++++ Transfer payments to decrease
