The unemployment rate hit a
14-year high last month. A fair number of those who lost jobs, as you know, were journalists.
Now, just more than 10.1 million people are unemployed. It is a number that is too big to really understand, which is why we need to put faces on the stories we report. Here are some ideas to help you get started:
- The college student. In four weeks or so, winter graduation will occur, and a whole new generation of freshly-minted graduates will be looking for work. Graduation is often preceded by a job fair. When is the job fair, and what are recruiters hearing? There are also "virtual" job fairs. Do these fairs work?
- The military recruiter. When people get hard-up for work, the military might become a more attractive option, even in wartime. Are recruiters seeing more interest in this? Is a steady job a motivation? The Huffington Post raised the question of whether the military might be a more attractive option now that Obama has been elected and promises to get America out of Iraq.
- Holiday Helpers. Just about anyone who wanted a job used to be able to find one during the Christmas season, when retailers would hire seasonal help. Not this year, though.
BusinessWeek reports:
Consumer electronics chain Best Buy Inc. said last month that it would hire fewer seasonal workers this year. The Minneapolis-based company said it anticipates hiring 16,000 to 20,000 employees for this holiday season, compared with the roughly 26,000 people it hired for the season last year. The company is also leaving the decision up to the stores as to how many staff to hire, rather than the corporation setting the staffing levels.
This year's holiday hiring levels are also being depressed by the rash of store closings and liquidations that have picked up in recent weeks.
Careerplanner.com has a list of jobs that are disappearing and jobs that are growing.
"The Occupational Outlook Handbook," an annual publication of the U.S. Department of Labor, gives forecasts on particular occupations and helps jobseekers understand what employers require of workers. You may also want to take a look at the publication,
"Tomorrow's Jobs," which is the government's official forecast of what types of jobs will grow and decline in the future.
Unemployment carries its own set of emotional and pschological problems.
Vhi Healthcare says:
Grief, uncertainty, self-doubt are textbook responses to losing a job. It's also a recipe for a breakdown of mental health. A 1995 study of 897 married couples conducted by researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mental health problems often went hand-in-hand with unemployment. For instance, men who had lost jobs within the last four years were three times more likely than stably employed men to have recently abused alcohol. Likewise, women who had a stint of unemployment were three times more likely than other women to have suffered prolonged bouts of depression. All totaled, over 30 percent of all subjects with a history of job loss had also suffered a serious mental health problem, compared with 19 percent of people who worked steadily. For some, the turmoil is too much to take. A study of more than 500,000 people in Great Britain found that people who said they were unemployed in a 1981 census were almost three times more likely than employed people to commit suicide in the next 10 years.
Unemployment also leads to being uninsured.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports:
A one percent rise in the nation's unemployment rate is projected to increase the number of uninsured by 1.1 million and result in an additional 1 million (600,000 children and 400,000 adults) enrolling in Medicaid, increasing state Medicaid spending by $1.4 billion at time when their tax revenues would fall by 3 to 4 percent.
To develop a greater perspective on unemployment,
look at these historical unemployment figures.
Regional and state employment and unemployment figures for October 2008 are scheduled to be issued on Friday, Nov. 21, at 10 a.m. EST.
