SoylentNews

-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the demand-is-down dept.

The World Socialist Web Site reports [wsws.org]

A new study by a University of California-Berkeley economist says that at current sluggish levels of job growth, entire regions of the United States, which were hit hardest by the Great Recession, will not return to "normal" employment levels until the 2020s. This amounts, to "more than a 'lost decade' of depressed employment" for "half of the country", wrote economist Danny Yagan.

The new study is one of many showing that the fall of the official unemployment rate, touted by the Obama administration and the news media as proof of a robust economic recovery, if not a return to "full employment", is largely based on the fact that millions of workers fell out of the labor force in the years preceding and following the 2008 financial crash.

The labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent last fall, and only climbed up to 62.9 percent in February. According to the Economic Policy Institute, February's official jobless rate of 4.9 percent--the lowest since the pre-recession level of 4.7 percent in November 2007--would really be 6.3 percent if the country's "missing workers" were included. These include 2.4 million workers who have given up actively looking for work. Trend graphic [wsws.org]

Yagan [...] found that the areas hardest hit by the recession, which began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, continued to have high levels of joblessness in 2014. Map [wsws.org] [Note the entire state of Florida.]

[...]Last month's Labor Department employment report noted that the average annual unemployment rate in 36 states, plus Washington, D.C. was higher in 2015 than the average unemployment rate for those states in 2007.

[...]The details of these studies will come as no surprise for tens of millions of workers across the United States who face unprecedented levels of economic insecurity, ongoing mass layoffs, and more than a decade of stagnating or falling real wages.

[...]Continual layoffs in the US have been driven by the plunging price of steel, petroleum, coal, and other commodities, which has been generated in large measure by the fall in demand from China and other so-called emerging economies.

Original Submission