It’s Still Bad for the Long-Term Unemployed

At first blush, it’s great news. The number of long-term unemployed Americans - meaning those out of a job for more than six months - has dropped to 3.7 million in March from a high of 6.8 million in April 2010. The ranks of the long-term jobless have plummeted by 837,000 over the past year alone, helping to drive down the unemployment rate.

But not so fast. The labor market has largely normalized in terms of short-term unemployment. But it gets worse and worse the longer you’ve been out of a job. As the chart that ran with a story I wrote today shows, short-term joblessness is actually well below its 2007 level. Long-term joblessness is still more than twice as high.

So what’s happening to the long-term unemployed? Well, some of them are getting jobs. The problem is that often those jobs are part-time, or pay far less than the ones that workers had before. About 7.4 million Americans - up from 7.2 million as of November - are working part-time but would like to be working full-time.

And new research by Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and his co-authors shows that only one in 10 workers who counted themselves as long-term jobless in a given month between 2008 and 2012 had a full-time gig a year later.

The federal government is offering less and less help to the long-term jobless. In January, an emergency program that pushed the maximum duration of jobless benefits up to as many as 73 weeks expired. Now, in most states, the maximum duration of payments is 26 weeks. Once those payments run out - along with the government requirement that a worker be looking for a job while receiving them - many among the long-term jobless accept a crummy job or simply give up.

The evidence remains that the so-so recovery is not enough to help the long-term jobless. “In some ways, the job market is tougher now than in any recession,” said Janet L. Yellen, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, in a speech this week. “These workers find it exceptionally hard to find steady, regular work, and they appear to be at a severe competitive disadvantage when trying to find a job. The concern is that the long-term unemployed may remain on the sidelines, ultimately dropping out of the workforce.”

But she gave one glimmer of hope: that a faster recovery would help the long-term jobless, if it would only speed up.