6.3 Million

A recent New York Times article, "Millions of People Face Years without Jobs," reported that 6.3 million people in the United States have been out of work for six months or longer...at least, that's how many people show up in the government records. Who knows how high the number really is.

However inaccurate it might be, this number, 6.3 million, is twice as high as it was in the last serious economic downturn, in the early 1980s. It's higher than it has been since 1948, when the government started keeping records on this.

The same article also reports that the current recession has had an especially severe impact on women ages 45 to 64, who are entering the ranks of the long-term unemployed in particularly high numbers. This sent a chill up my spine, of course; I've only been fitfully employed for years now, and don't know what the situation will be like when I re-enter the job market (which could occur in about six months--one year at the most). And I recently turned 45.

But I don't want to emphasize the personal impact of the article. The ramifications of this long-term unemployment problem for the entire country and for every citizen in it are enormous. Millions of people are falling into poverty, and they will receive minimal or no support from the social safety net. Actually, if a safety net still exists, it has been ripped up so severely during the last thirty years of Reaganomics, Clintonomics and Bushonomics that it shouldn't be called a "net" any more; it's more like Silly String at this point (and it's landing in the faces of the long-term unemployed).

Do I sound like a bleeding-heart liberal? I can imagine some people reading the article and saying, "There are thousands of charities out there--surely these people will survive, and that's what they deserve because they didn't retrain themselves for a job where the demand is high, like health care." Those people have never been brutally kicked out of a job, not because of their own incompetence, but because someone higher up dropped the ball in some major way and the company fell apart, or because of some major societal force beyond their control. Those people have never experienced hunger for days on end, or if they have, it was when they were young and could fight ferociously for a better rung on the ladder. Those people simply need to wake up to the reality of this place and time. And it doesn't take a bleeding-heart liberal to say that, or to see that things are particularly bad for the long-term unemployed right now, and for everyone who might be impacted by the rise in hunger, desperation, and psychical or physical violence that are bound to result from this problem. In other words, everyone.

What we can do about that is another question entirely; and once again, I find myself sorely lacking in good answers at the moment. A re-working of the entire social fabric of the country is what seems to be required. A pipe dream? But maybe a lot of people are dreaming of such a thing.