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How Many People Are Unemployed In The United States

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Million Americans Are Unemployedheres The Story Of The Job Seekers Behind The Numbers

Why The U.S. Unemployment System Is Failing

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On Thursday, the United States Department of Labor announced that over 1.3 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week. This report marks the 17th consecutive week of 1-million-plus unemployment claims. About 51 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This doesnt include the millions of others whove finished collecting benefits, given up looking for a job or have reluctantly taken a position far below their prior compensation level just to make ends meet.;

Now, all we ever hear about is the data behind the jobs crisis. However, we hardly ever hear the personalized stories of the Americans behind the statistics. Here are some of the testimonies of the people who are gallantly trying to find a new job against all odds during this very unforgiving job market.

Donna Lauria doesnt possess a college degree, but found her way into Prudentialone of the largest insurance and financial services firms in the world. She spent decades at the Newark, New Jersey-based organization, working her way up the corporate ladder and earned roughly $200k in salary, bonuses and benefits.;

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A big challenge she faces is dealing with fighting off the debilitating feelings of depression, anxiety and fear of what will happen in the future. This is a common theme among the dozens of people with whom I spoke with for this piece.;

Sandra Remorenkowas told by her boss via a phone call that her services were no longer required. There was no empathy or compassionjust a curt goodbye and good luck.

Remorenko was an executive assistant to the head of a high-end wealth management firm located in an exclusive suburb of Atlanta. Prior to that role, Remorenko was an executive assistant to a prominent CPA firm founder and CEO. She had also worked at a top-tier private bank.;

Despite her credentials and sending out over 100 résumés and applications, cold calling; companies and recruiters, she didnt get any responses. Remorenko said that she reached out to everyone she knew and even applied for entry-level positions. Her few interviews were cold and callous. One company demanded that she prepare something creative, like a video or sing a song. She was told in order to work at that hiring company, You have to be a magician. She complied with the outlandish request, but never heard back.;

Remorenko is greatly concerned over her situation. Some days, she feels totally overwhelmed and finds it hard to sleep well, stating she cant turn off brain.;

She notices a cognitive dissonance between what she’s been told to do and her new reality.

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In mid-July 2020, the United States was in the throws of confronting the second wave of covid-19 infections, and more than 30 million people were claiming unemployment benefits. Just two weeks ago, the total number of people reported to be receiving benefits had dropped by more than half to 13.2 million.

When the pandemic took hold in the United States back in March 2020, Congress quickly passed the CARES Act, which made significant changes to unemployment insurance. The tens of millions who lost their jobs benefited from these new programs:

  • Pandemic Unemployment Assistance , which provides unemployment benefits to individuals who are self-employed, seeking part-time employment, or who otherwise would not qualify for regular unemployment compensation.
  • Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation , allowed those eligible to receive unemployment compensation, additional coverage as many states have a cap on the number of weeks claims can be made. This program also provides a $300 topper sent by the federal government in addition to state benefits.

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The New Deal: A Road To Recovery

Among the programs and institutions of the New Deal that aided in recovery from the Great Depression were the Tennessee Valley Authority , which built dams and hydroelectric projects to control flooding and provide electric power to the impoverished Tennessee Valley region, and the Works Progress Administration , a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935 to 1943.

When the Great Depression began, the United States was the only industrialized country in the world without some form of unemployment insurance or social security. In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which for the first time provided Americans with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age.

After showing early signs of recovery beginning in the spring of 1933, the economy continued to improve throughout the next three years, during which real GDP grew at an average rate of 9 percent per year.

A sharp recession hit in 1937, caused in part by the Federal Reserves decision to increase its requirements for money in reserve. Though the economy began improving again in 1938, this second severe contraction reversed many of the gains in production and employment and prolonged the effects of the Great Depression through the end of the decade.

Large Cities Still Reporting Most Cases

College student quarantined in Texas with suspected ...

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are still reporting the most cases of COVID-19 each day, and many other outbreaks across the country are linked to the outbreaks in America’s most populated cities, according to the New York Times.

Though cases in Detroit and New Orleans, early hot spots, have dropped in recent weeks, Chicago now reports roughly the same number of cases as New York City each day, with Los Angeles a close third.

In total, the country has 1,271,775 cases of COVID-19, and 76,368 deaths. According to the New York Times, about 29,000 new cases and about 1,900 new deaths were reported on Thursday, a trend seen in recent weeks as the nation has hovered around 25,000 cases per day and roughly 2,000 deaths.

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Median Age Of The Population

The United States has dozens of major cities, including 31 “global cities” of all types, with 10 in the “alpha” group of global cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Atlanta. As of 2011, the United States had 51 metropolitan areas with a population of over 1,000,000 people each.

As of 2011, about 250 million Americans live in or around urban areas. That means more than three-quarters of the U.S. population shares just about three percent of the U.S. land area.

The following table shows the populations of the top twenty metropolitan areas. Note Denver and Baltimore have over 2.5 million residents in their metro areas, and the San Juan metro area has more than 2 million residents.

Based on 2018 MSA population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau

What Are The Classes In Our Society

The upper-middle-class consists of people that are highly educated and are considered professionals in their respective fields. These people earn enough money and are often employed in well-paying jobs. They are considered privileged by most members of society. They are not as easy to define as the members of the upper class, as they make up for a significantly larger portion of society. Still, their numbers are far smaller than those of people in the lower classes.;

The middle class consists largely of people that are college-educated and are working in white-collar industries. They often choose to help the underprivileged and are known to join in the fight for social justice. The class system in itself is corrupt because it gives the majority of goods to the smallest number of people, and it is something that needs to be changed if we expect our society to continue functioning normally.

The last three classes are also much harder to define because people can easily jump from one to the other. The lower middle class consists of people that are semi-professionals in their fields, the working class is mostly blue-collar workers, and the lower class contains people with low paying jobs and the unemployed. All of these people fluctuate between having a job and being unemployed, because the upper classes determine the workforce and the need for it, and in a way, they control the lives of the people that are stuck in the lower classes.

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What Are The Other Measures Of Us Unemployment

In response to criticisms that the official rate paints an unjustifiably rosy picture of the health of the labor market, the BLS publishes five alternative measures: U-1, U-2, U-4, U-5, and U-6. Though these are often referred to as unemployment rates , U-3 is the official and the most commonly cited national unemployment rate. The others are characterized as measures of “labor underutilization.”

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The concern is that this time around there has not been a boom for many and those who have done badly will now do even worse, they wrote. The young, the lower income and least educated groups who generally do well in a boom but didnt in the last boom are thus even more vulnerable than usual in the coming downturn.

Each week, the breadth of the recession comes into finer focus. Consumers are pessimistic, and manufacturing sentiment plumbs new depths.

The problem is the economy is still shut down, says Torsten Slok, the chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. The doors are still closed. There is still no smoke coming out of the chimneys in corporate America. Given that, he adds, it is not surprising that you continue to see significant layoffs.

In recent days, President Donald Trump has suggested several states could ease some of the restrictions they have put in place to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

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Collection Of Unemployment Data

Official U.S. employment statistics are produced by the BLS, an agency within the Department of Labor. Every month the Census Bureau, part of the Department of Commerce, conducts the Current Population Survey using a sample of around 60,000 households, or around 110,000 individuals.

The survey collects data on individuals in these households by race, ethnicity, age, veteran status, and gender, all of whichalong with geographyadd nuance to the employment data. The sample is rotated so that 75% of the households are constant from month to month and 50% are from year to year. Interviews are conducted in person or by phone.

The survey excludes individuals under the age of 16 and those who are in the Armed Forces . People in correctional facilities, mental healthcare facilities, and other similar institutions are also excluded. Interviewers ask a series of questions that determine employment status, but do not ask whether respondents are employed or unemployed. Nor do the interviewers themselves assign employment status; they record the answers for the BLS to analyze.

Interviewers also collect information on industry, occupation, average earnings, union membership, andfor the joblesswhether they quit or were discharged .

Us States With The Highest Unemployment Rates

According to OECD , unemployment is when individuals above a specified age are not self-employed or in a paying job and are available for work in a certain period. Generally, unemployment increases during a recession and decreases during periods of economic prosperity. Unemployment and job creation are affected by numerous factors, including demographics, automation, education, global competitions, and economic conditions. These factors also determine the wage levels, unemployment duration, and the number of workers. The United States had an unemployment rate of about 3.5% on September 2019, which is the lowest it has ever had since 1969, with the unemployment rate of some states like Alaska being as high as 6.2%. The countrys unemployment rate increased to 3.6% in October before decreasing to 3.5% in November.;

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Why Is There Such A Big Gap In The Data

The first thing to understand is how each figure is derived. The 10.1 million unemployed data point comes from a survey of 60,000 households the Census Bureau collects each month. All the adults in the household are asked a series of questions about whether they are employed full or part time, if they are looking for work or if they have given up and stopped looking for a job. To be considered officially unemployed, someone must have searched for a job within the past month.

In normal times, this monthly survey works pretty well, but these are not normal times. Response rates to this survey have fallen during the pandemic, and low-income families that have been hit hardest by the pandemic and job losses have been the least likely to respond, census researchers found.

Another unusual challengeof this pandemic is a lot of people arent sure if they are truly unemployed or just on an extended absence from work. The Labor Department has been open about a misclassification error in which some people who should have been marked as temporarily unemployed were instead classified as employed but absent from work for other reasons. This issue makes the unemployment figures look betterthan they are.

Women In The Great Depression

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There was one group of Americans who actually gained jobs during the Great Depression: Women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million Though theyd been steadily entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. The 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also created an increase in single women in search of employment.

Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for more women in officelike Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position.

Jobs available to women paid less, but were more stable during the banking crisis: nursing, teaching and domestic work. They were supplanted by an increase in secretarial roles in FDRs rapidly-expanding government. But there was a catch: over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administrations wage codes set lower wages for women, and jobs created under the WPA confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.

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Us Added 943000 Jobs In July; Unemployment Rate At 54%

The number of people who reported they had jobs surged by 1 million, pushing the jobless rate down from 5.9% in June.

A shopper passes a hiring sign while entering a retail store in Morton Grove, Ill. | Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo

08/06/2021 08:55 AM EDT

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Hiring surged in July as American employers added 943,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.4% another sign that the U.S. economy continues to bounce back with surprising vigor from last years coronavirus shutdown.

The July numbers exceeded economists forecast for more than 860,000 new jobs. Hotels and restaurants, reopening and doing brisk business, added 327,000 jobs last month. Local public schools added 221,000.

The number of people who reported they had jobs surged by 1 million, pushing the jobless rate down from 5.9% in June. Last month, 261,000 people returned to the job market.

Scrambling to find workers as business surges back, companies raised wages: Average hourly earnings were up 4% last month from a year earlier.

The coronavirus triggered a brief but intense recession last spring, forcing businesses to shut down and consumers to stay home as a health precaution. The economy lost more than 22 million jobs in March and April 2020. Since then, though, it has recovered nearly 17 million jobs, leaving a 5.7 million shortfall compared to February 2020.

Things are undeniably moving in the right direction, said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

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How High Could Unemployment Go

Most economists expect the unemployment rate to rise a little later this year even though it is hoped more restrictions can be lifted.

That is because many government support schemes – such as furlough – are due to end after September.

The Bank of England expects the unemployment rate to reach around 5.5% in the autumn.

However, the number of unemployed is expected to fall next year as the economy continues to recover.

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Store: Owner: With: Mask: Open: Signjpg

The US jobs report for April brings sobering, if not unexpected news: The country has lost 20.6 million jobs since mid-March, resulting in an unemployment rate of 14.7%, a level not seen since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The number of jobs lost more than doubles the number seen in the 2007-2009 Great Recession, when 8.7 million Americans lost jobs.

Before the pandemic, the United States marked a 50-year unemployment low in February, with just 3.5% of Americans unemployed.

According to USA Today, of the 20.6 million jobs lost, 18 million are expected to be temporary when the pandemic recedes.

Restaurants, bars, travel, and retails are the hardest-hit sectors. Though 40 states are now in the process of reopening parts of the economy, economists warn recovery is not expected for many months, or even years.

The Worst States For Unemployed Americans During Covid

Unemployment remains above 10 percent in the United States

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to devastate the U.S. economy, the unemployment rate has soared to 14.7% the highest since the Great Depression.

To help cushion the blow, the Cares Act the same federal law that brought you those $1,200 stimulus checks is providing unemployed Americans with an extra $600 a week for up to four months and an additional 13 weeks of payments if their benefits run out.

Even so, getting by on unemployment during the crisis has been much harder in some states than in others. We’ve found the 15 worst states, using data from the U.S. Department of Labor, state labor departments and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That data includes the maximum weekly payment and length a person can receive assistance, not including the extra benefits from Cares. It also includes each state’s most recent “recipiency rate”: the percentage of unemployed people who actually get regular benefits. Those missing out include people who don’t qualify under their states rules.

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