I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day". I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new nor…
(Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.) The welfare-reform efforts of the past 15-20 years in most western countries have tended to do exactly the opposite, oddly enough. Out of a worry that people were just receiving benefits without really looking for work, you must now demonstrate that you're actively…
During this time (over 1 year), she has applied for many jobs (including an interview with a nursing home facility (sorry, don't know the details) on a reservation in New Mexico, where she would have to commute an hour each way to work--where she was a good fit and the daughter of one her teachers arranged for the interview). Some have been at traditional companies (HR), others have been at Target, Macy's, and other temporary jobs. Here's what she's found:
1) If you have a college degree, it's hard to get hired even for jobs that are 9 months with no chance of permanent employment, because you are "over qualified" 2) These unemployment centers are fairly useless for those with an education. If you go in everyday and a job happens to come in that matches you, then good. Otherwise, you're better off searching the internet yourself. Also, most of the money that's provided for training is for pretty basic jobs, like "medical coding" which seem like good outsourcing targets. Even though you go through the hoops for these, getting authorized to take these certificate programs can be Kafka-esque.
For my sister, while she's still looking for a job, she's decided she wants to go the entrepreneurial route. She got a chance to pitch her idea to an incubator in Ann Arbor, but she only had crude drawings and while they liked the idea, they really wanted a prototype. She is not a coder, so she's enrolled for some courses at the local community college.
But, I will say that I've seen some bias against hiring people who have been unemployed for some time. For example, a friend works as a pharmaceutical researcher and was told by recruiters that they are only interested in people who currently are employed (she was)...I think there's a tendency to believe that the jobs are out "there" and people are just too lazy to find them.
However, I'm increasingly believing that we've moved to a two fluid model (to coin a physics phrase) where for people with specialized skills, or experience (for example, I've talked to people in sales at IBM and other companies who have told me that they've found it hard to hire people with the skills they want), the job market is actually not that bad and they are being actively recruited. On the other hand, there are people with lower skills and for them the outlook is rather bleak.