Wednesday, August 18, 2010

State and local job losses threaten recovery

Two years ago, state and local governments began shedding workers as they struggled to balance their budgets. What began as a trickle of job losses is becoming a flood. As the chart shows, a total of more than 300,000 state and local government jobs have been lost since August 2008, with 48,000 payroll jobs cut last month alone. The pace of job loss is accelerating and threatens to overwhelm the meager job gains in the private sector.

Legislation passed the Senate last week to slow this tide of unemployment$16.1 billion of funding for state Medicaid programs and $10 billion to save education jobs. We estimate that the Medicaid funds will save 158,000 jobs, including police officers, firefighters, and health care workers. But more than half the jobs saved will be in the private sector, including workers who contract for or supply services to state and local governments. The Department of Education estimates that the education funds will save another 161,000 jobs in public schools. These jobs and the funding to save them are desperately needed, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi deserves praise for calling the House back from recess to vote on them.



Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Older men face longer job searches

This Father’s day, millions of fathers and grandfathers are struggling to find jobs, and data show that the older the man, the longer he is likely to remain unemployed. Long-term unemployment lasting more than six months has reached record levels during the current jobs crisis. Among male workers age 20 to 24, close to one-third are long-term unemployed. That share increases progressively with age. Among unemployed men age 55 to 64, close to half – 49.7% -- have been out of work for more than six months. The Figure shows the portion of long-term unemployed men by age. (Because monthly data are not seasonally-adjusted, percentages were calculated based on a 12-month average of monthly rates of long-term unemployment from June 2009 through May 2010.)

Across all age groups, 39.9% of unemployed men are long-term unemployed. Many of them have exhausted or are at risk of soon exhausting their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Unemployed workers are typically eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment insurance, but during the Great Recession, Congress extended that for up to 99 weeks in order to stimulate the economy and strengthen the safety net for millions of long-term unemployed. That extension expired last month, and although the House of Representatives voted in May to maintain extended UI benefits beyond the standard 26 weeks, the Senate has not yet voted on the extension. As a result, by the end of June, well over one million jobless workers will have lost their unemployment insurance coverage.