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6 The Extent of Unemployment and Underemployment Our nation has a peculiar work ethic. It insists that people work for a living, which is a valid expectation, but it does not insist that the private and public sectors provide enough jobs at livable wages for everyone who wants to work. —Jesse L. Jackson Jr., A More Perfect Union There are people who sincerely believe that there is a decent job in our country for every person who wants one. They are very, very mistaken. Millions of people in this country are not working at all, and millions more are working part-time when they would like to be working fulltime . This lack of decent work occurs in good times and in bad. Whether the economy is up or down, there are millions of people who are unemployed , many apparently permanently. While millions of the poor do work, other millions of the poor do not work. Of these, the largest group is children. Others are too sick or too limited to work. Some have given up trying to find work. Others work but not full-time. The reality of unemployment and underemployment is that lack of work in good times and in bad continues to be a problem in our country, especially for minority and lower-skilled workers. Start by considering that the unemployment figures usually reported by the media estimate only about half the number of people who actually need jobs, as noted in Myth #3 (see Chapter 2).1 What is usually termed as the “official” unemployment rate is, as one writer put it, a “gravely misleading statistic.”2 If you count the people who are working part-time but would like to work full-time as well as those who have stopped looking for work, a more realistic picture of the lack of jobs emerges—a picture usually twice the size reported by the general media.3 55 56 Chapter 6 For example, in May 2002, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) reported that the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent and that 8.4 million people were unemployed. That in itself is a real reason to be concerned —more than 8 million people out of work. But the real number of people in May 2002 who needed work, also reported by the DOL but not usually picked up by the media, was actually more than 17 million. The official number of unemployed does not count millions of other people who need work. At the same time as the DOL reported in May 2002 that 8.4 million were out of work, the department also reported that there were an additional 3.8 million persons who were working part-time but wanted to be working full-time, and another 5.4 million people who were unemployed and wanted jobs but were classified as no longer actively looking for work. Some were classified as “discouraged” workers, people who wanted to work and were available to work but could not find work and have given up looking. Others were unable to seek work because of disability or home responsibilities. Thus, instead of the 8.4 million figure reported, the actual number of people who are either out of work or not working full-time and who would like to be is around 17.6 million, well more than double the total usually reported. Instead of an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent in May 2002, our nation was really facing an unemployment and underemployment rate of more than 12 percent.4 Unemployment is a constant and predictable part of our current economic system. As Robert Solow, the 1987 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, said, “There is absolutely no reason to believe our economy holds a substantial number of unfilled vacancies for unqualified workers.”5 Further, no matter what the national unemployment rate is, unemployment among minority workers is usually double that of white workers.6 For example, unemployment among black adults has been above 10 percent since the 1970s, about twice the rate of white unemployment .7 Nationwide, new jobs have indeed been created, but much of this growth in employment has occurred “in the suburbs, exurbs, and nonmetropolitan areas far removed from growing concentrations of poorly educated urban minorities,”8 which is another way of saying that the poor could not get to the jobs. Many poor people do not own cars. Of course, they could use public transit, but...

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