Long-term unemployment is on the rise, breaking the pattern of past decades. One reason for this is the fact that far fewer women drop out of the workforce than in previous years.

The latest figures also continue to register higher levels of unemployment for Blacks (9.6 percent) and Latinos (7.5 percent) than for whites (5.1 percent). While last month’s unemployment figure is down from the eight-year high of 6 percent reached in April, it’s still close to 50 percent higher than two years ago, and likely to rise.

Some capitalist economists who expected the figure to be higher as a result of the weakest job growth in a decade were caught off guard. Steven Wieting, a senior economist at Solomon Smith Barney, tried to put a positive spin on it. "For financial markets that were fearing a real deterioration, this is good news," he said. "A choppy, gradual and modest recovery seems most likely."

Others were less sanguine. A recent article in the Financial Times entitled, "Despondent workers depress unemployment rate," pointed to the fact that the number of unemployed workers no longer actively seeking work has grown at the fastest pace in any 12-month period since record keeping on the trend began in the mid-1970s. Rory Robertson, a bond market strategist for wealthy investors who works for the Australia-based Macquarie Bank, takes this trend as a sign of weakness. "Employment growth is jumping over a very low bar to stop the unemployment rate from rising," Robertson said. "That is hardly a sign of U.S. economic strength. Strong economies produce strong jobs growth. The U.S. clearly remains very weak."

As if confirming such an assessment, jobless claims jumped by 19,000 to 426,000 in the first week of September.

Long-term joblessness--defined by the U.S. Department of Labor as being without a job for 15 weeks or more--has increased by 50 percent in the past year, reaching 2.8 million in August.

The average length of unemployment was 16.2 weeks in August. When the jobless rate hovered around 6 percent in the 1970s and ‘80s, as it has recently, the average stint of unemployment was substantially lower--10 to 12 weeks.

Far more women than previously are responding to layoffs by continuing the search for a job as opposed to dropping out of the job force entirely, as many did in the past. A National Bureau of Economic Research study in 2001 by Katharine Abraham and Robert Shimer attribute the change to the greater "attachment to the labor force" of women workers. That is, a growing number of women must work to survive and are no longer willing to accept being relegated to second-class status.

This trend is linked to deep-going changes in the family structure in the last decades, with only half of households headed by married couples, and a rising rate of children--nearly one-third--born to unmarried women. Divorce rates are also much higher. At the same time, women have been targets of the attack on the social wage carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties over the past decade, which resulted in nearly 50 percent of welfare recipients being driven off the rolls between 1993 and 1998.  
 
More claims for disability being filed
In a related development, government figures show that 5.42 million workers are receiving disability benefits, up from 3 million in 1990, with the average age of people on disability down from previous years.

The rise in disability claims has provoked a discussion in the capitalist media. Some corporate and government officials accuse workers of trying to cheat the system. "When you are a person who has lost a job, and you can’t find another and you are home sitting on the couch, you become preoccupied with ailments that do qualify in many cases as legal disability but while you were working did not come into your mind," stated Cleveland disability claims judge Morley White.

According to a September 2 New York Times article entitled "Laid-off workers swelling the cost of disability pay," research by a number of economists, "indicates that the numbers signal instead a reliance on disability benefits by low-end workers who had ignored their ailments as long as their limited skills brought them steady employment." Some 40 percent of workers on disability had to appeal earlier denials in order to receive benefits.  
 
 
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