Once you’ve been laid off awhile and then get back in, you kind of forget how it feels, but if I were unemployed, this article in the New York Times would really scare me. Are things really different this time? Is this the recession that never ends?
Of course, it has ended in a sense, but now the damage has to reverse itself and that’s the part that seems like it just might not happen. According to the article:
Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.
Older people without in-demand skills are clearly very vulnerable. Already more people have been unemployed for 6 months or longer than at any time since the government started tracking these things, there are many forces at work to keep it that way, and social services all over the nation are straining under the pressure.
I feel almost helpless trying to see some way we’ll get out of this and glad that at least for the moment I have a job.
