Vocaboly.com

[Ray Woodcock]

[Excerpts from New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/opinion/08HERB.html?th. Note
especially the part about how college degree holders -- many
subsidized with student loans -- are having a particularly hard time
finding jobs.]

The Unrecognizable Recovery
By BOB HERBERT

Published: March 8, 2004


.... The Labor Department report [last Friday] was as grim as faces on
a bread line. Despite all the president's promises, the economy added
just 21,000 jobs last month. No jobs were added by the private sector.
The 21,000 additional jobs were all government hires. ...

According to [one] study, "The estimated 36.8 percent employment rate
for the nation's teens was the lowest ever recorded since 1948."

A more ominous finding was that over the past three calendar years the
number of people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of
school increased from 4.8 million to 5.6 million, with males
accounting for the bulk of the increase.

[This is ominous, I assume, because this group has special historical
potential for crime, riot, and revolution. Note that, with a
different policy toward financing higher education, many of those
people could instead be getting trained -- and, in the process, would
be being socialized into more socially constructive attitudes and
roles.]

The Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project,
in a joint analysis of newly released data, reported a disturbing
increase in long-term joblessness. Unemployment lasting half a year or
longer grew to 22.1 percent of all unemployment in 2003. That was an
increase from 18.3 percent in 2002, and the highest rate since 1983.

Among those having a particularly hard time finding work, according to
the report, are job seekers with college degrees and people 45 and
older.

"The new data," said Sylvia Allegretto, one of the authors of the
report, "show us an economy that is just not generating enough high-
quality jobs to get highly educated and highly experienced workers
back to work."

The nation is in an employment crisis and the end is not in sight. ...

What is happening in some sectors of the black community is
catastrophic. The Community Service Society studied employment
conditions among black men in New York City. Using the employment-
population ratio, which is the proportion of the working-age
population with a job, it found — incredibly — that nearly one of
every two black men [in NYC, I assume] between the ages of 16 and 64
was not working last year. ...