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1 1 Introduction Lauren D. Appelbaum Institute for Research on Labor and Employment University of California–Los Angeles The Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, was like none other in most of our lifetimes. No other recession in recent history has had comparable job losses. The second-worst recession, in 1981–1982, saw a drop of 2.8 million jobs, or 3.1 percent of payroll employment. By comparison, job losses from the Great Recession reached 7.9 million jobs, or 5.7 percent of payroll employment from December 2007 until jobs started to consistently increase in October 2010. As recently as February 2012, an additional 8.1 million people found themselves in part-time jobs when they actually wanted to be working full time, either because their hours had been cut or because there were no full-time positions available. At the recession’s peak, the unemployment rate in the country was 10 percent, and over 26 million people were either unemployed, working part time for economic reasons, wanted a job but stopped looking because of personal reasons (e.g., school or family responsibility), or had become too discouraged to continue searching for a job (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012a,b,c). After nearly two years of recession, the U.S. economy entered a period of slow recovery in the third quarter of 2009. However, despite 11 quarters of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, jobs have just barely started to recover. Job growth was not consistent until October 2010, 16 months after the official end of the recession. Even after this point, job growth remained tepid, and the average job growth for the six months prior to and including February 2012 was still only about 200,000 jobs per month. At this rate, it will take more than eight years—until the end of 2020—to recover the jobs lost since the start of the recession and the approximately 100,000 jobs that should have been gained each month to account for the growth in the working-age population. Even if jobs 2 Appelbaum continue to grow at the rate of almost 245,000 jobs per month that the country has experienced over the past three months (at the time of this writing, December 2011 to February 2012), it will take six years to get back to prerecession jobs levels (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011a). Furthermore, real GDP, which grew at a rate of 3 percent in 2010, slowed in 2011, and grew at an annual rate of 1.7 percent in 2011, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (2012). In order to make a dent in the jobs deficit and to decrease the unemployment rate, the economy needs to gain about 300,000 jobs each month, and GDP needs to grow at a rate of 5–6 percent annually until the labor market recovers. As a result of the anemic job growth experienced since the official end of the recession, the unemployment rate in the United States, which has fallen from 9.1 percent in August 2011 to 8.3 percent in January 2012 (and remained as of February 2012), is expected to stay above 8 percent for all of 2012 and 2013 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011b; Congressional Budget Office 2012). In February 2012, 12.8 million people still remained unemployed, 2.6 million were only marginally attached to the labor force, and as noted above, 8.1 million people were working part time for economic reasons (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011c).1 Most notably, long-term unemployment in the United States has become a significant problem. As of February 2012, among the officially unemployed, 5.4 million, or 42.6 percent, had been out of work for more than six months, and 29.2 percent had been unemployed for a year or more; the average time to find a job had reached more than nine months (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011c,d).2 Furthermore, by February of 2012, the working-age population of the United States had grown by about 9.3 million people from the start of the recession, but the labor force had only grown by less than 1 million (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011b). Since the labor force usually grows with the increase in the working-age population, this is a remarkable development . Certainly, some jobless people are looking at the poor economic climate and choosing not to enter the labor force, deciding instead, for example, to return...

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