A while back I posted about a Pew study looking at long-term unemployment. About a third of those currently out of work have been unemployed for a year or longer.
That makes a recent video released by 60 Minutes Overtime particularly striking. The reporters discuss evidence of discrimination against the long-term unemployed, with employers particularly unwilling to hire those who have been out of a job for two years or more. Given the length and severity of the current recession, this leaves large numbers of jobless people facing the frustrating paradox that you often need a job to get a job, leaving them trapped:
Comments 27
Amadi — March 23, 2012
Has anyone even attempted to put forth a rationale for this discrimination?
Laura — March 23, 2012
Chicago just passed an ordinance prohibiting employers from advertising jobs with "the unemployed need not apply."
Sourmarshmallow — March 23, 2012
It seems to me that society today is just trying to find excuses to shun somebody out. Why would you need to have a job to get another one? Isn't the unemployment rate way too high to do that? I believe the reason companies don't hire the long term unemployed is because, to them, it's like "Oh they haven't gotten a job in a while? Then they must be lazy!"
Suggestion Saturday: March 24, 2012 | On The Other Hand — March 24, 2012
[...] Discrimination Against the Long-Term Unemployed. Sad. [...]
hypatia arez — March 24, 2012
Things like this just suck the life out of me. People are out of work because of the recession, how far is you head up your tuckus not to realize this? It's not some personal failing.
And from experience, I know, if you take a job under your pay grade just to be employed (keep busy so you don't go completely insane, make a little bit of money at least) they will look down on you for that as well.
If you don't get a job you're lazy and unmotivated. If you take a job you're lazy and unmotivated. Game, set, match.
Long-Term Unemployment | dogmic — March 24, 2012
[...] The Society Pages article that got me down this road. [...]
Anonymous — March 24, 2012
It's interesting that this is regarded as news now when it's been standard practice for years. In her 2005 book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Barbara Ehrenreich described spending nearly a year searching for corporate employment: the standard objection to her resume, she says, was "There's a gap", meaning the time she'd spent as a "consultant" rendered her unfit for employment.
emtzalex — March 27, 2012
For employers stupid enough to put this in writing, an African American job seeker should be able to easily put together a Disparate Impact case against said employer.
JL — September 8, 2012
Hiring managers probably don't have sympathy for these folks because they themselves have never been out of work. The part about an unemployed applicant bolting for greener pastures is really a red herring considering they are willing to poach someone from another company who has just done the same thing.
I'm tired of hearing politicians bitching about the millions of extra ppl on food stamps and SSI when. You still very much have to work in this society, and yet we shut people out for crappy reasons on the one hand and criticize them on the other when they need assistance for the first time ever because of these stupid rules.
I can't even get someone to let me feed their dog for a few days. Sometimes I read these stories and wish the hiring managers doing this would lose their job next week.