A story from the New York Times as filtered through the Center for Policy Analysis:
Men in the prime of their working lives are now less
likely to have jobs than they were during all but one
recession of the last 60 years. Most of them do not
qualify as unemployed, but they are nonetheless
without jobs, says the New York Times.
Among men ages 25 to 54 -- a range that starts after
most people finish their education and ends well
before most people retire - the unemployment rate
is 4.1 percent.
However, only people without jobs who are actively
looking for work qualify as unemployed in the
computation of that rate. It does not count people
who are not looking for work, whether or not they
would like to have a job. But there is another rate
-- called the jobless rate -- that counts the
proportion of people without jobs, explains
the Times.
o The jobless rate is at 13.1 percent for men in the
prime age group, according to the Department
of Labor.
o Only once during a post-World War II recession
did the rate ever get that high; it hit 13.3 percent
in June 1982, the 12th month of the brutal 1981-82
recession, and continued to rise from there.
o Even among women there has been some slippage;
the proportion of women ages 25 to 54 without
a job was 27.4 percent in March.
The government breaks down the figures by race,
and those figures show that over the last year almost
all the jobs lost by men in the 25 to 54 age group have
been lost by whites, with most of those losses affecting
men ages 35 to 44. There have been just a small number
of losses by black men in the 25 to 54 age group and
employment for Hispanic men is still growing, albeit
at a much slower pace than it was a few months
ago.
Source: Floyd Norris, "Many More are Jobless than are
Unemployed," New York Times, April 12, 2008.
For text:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/business/12charts.html
