The Long-Term Unemployed Are Doomed

I live in the part of the country that the article author recommends as a place to go to find work if unemployed. The long-term unemployed persons I know best came out of high school with very limited job skills (barely literate or numerate) and have spent their free time while unemployed mostly pursuing hobbies that do not further develop their job skills. (Some of the saddest cases I know are people who had problems with alcohol or other drug abuse in the early years of their working life.)<p>Many of those people would indeed be employable in St. Cloud, Minnesota or Mankato, Minnesota in entry-level, manual-labor jobs, but unemployment benefits have, till now, provided enough income to allow living independently without having to go to work each day. I&#x27;ll see what happens to the people I know best, locally, when the &quot;emergency&quot; extensions of unemployment benefits at long last cease. There are definitely employers in this frigidly cold state that are still on the lookout for willing workers, and I wish well to everyone seeking work. There are probably quite a few opportunities yet available to the people who will look for them.

People need to move to where the work is. Maybe the government could offer a tax break or stipend to get people to move (and somehow try not to let that get abused), I&#x27;d be surprised if the transportation industry isn&#x27;t lobbying for it already.<p>For generations, people moved. To Oregon&#x2F;California just because the east was too crowded and didn&#x27;t have much opportunity. To the midwest to work in the tire, steel, and auto plants. To the south for the new auto and manufacturing plants.<p>And now it will be to the plains for jobs in the construction and energy industries.<p>How long can people use the excuse &quot;I can&#x27;t afford to move&quot;, when you can&#x27;t afford not to? How long will they use the excuse &quot;I&#x27;m upside down on my mortgage?&quot; when they aren&#x27;t going to be right-side up anytime soon and aren&#x27;t working as it is?<p>Pack your shit up and move and send money back home to your family if you don&#x27;t want to bring them. The long-lasting unemployment benefits just keep &#x27;workers&#x27; stuck where they are, and as a result it keeps their families and future generations stuck in the same place.

It would be interesting to see what the socioeconomic&#x2F;educational attainment breakdown of the long-term unemployed looks like (Link anyone?).<p>I think the assumption is that most of people in this group are unskilled high-school drop outs but I wonder how many of them &quot;have some college&quot; or a degree and are just unwilling to &quot;lower themselves&quot; to working on an oil pipeline or any other kind of work associated with being blue collar. The assumption that people will take any job they can get, at least in my experience, is just plain wrong. For instance (I know this is just anecdotal) but I know quite a few people in NYC who attended elite schools that are perfectly happy to collect unemployment while they wait for a high prestige job opening (e.g. &quot;I&#x27;m waiting for the New Yorker to have a job opening&quot;). The thought that a government grant would get these people to go work in an oil field in South Dakota is absurd most of them are horrified at the thought of leaving Brooklyn. I was thinking of this article from Mike Rowe:<p><a href="http://profoundlydisconnected.com/cnn-viewer-has-questions/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;profoundlydisconnected.com&#x2F;cnn-viewer-has-questions&#x2F;</a><p>&quot;Right now, in the manufacturing sector alone, 600,000 jobs are currently available.&quot;<p>If that is indeed the case there is something else going on.

I&#x27;m from a country with a welfare state, where if you are unemployed the government pay your rent and give you a small amount of money to buy food until such time as you are employed again. Not understanding how the American system works, I find this article confusing. It sounds like there is a time limit on how long someone can claim unemployment benefit? So what happens after this time runs out, they just get kicked out of their home and starve&#x2F;freeze to death? Even if you don&#x27;t care about them on a human level, that sounds like it would be massively expensive in terms of increasing crime levels and providing hospital care for all the dying people. Honestly it sounds like something out of a dystopian cyberpunk novel.

This kind of skirts the problem. There are more unemployed than there are jobs. There are <i>far</i> more under-employed people working at McDonalds that would like better jobs.<p>Those jobs don&#x27;t exist. They just don&#x27;t. The jobs are in China or they are being done better by mechanical sorters at Amazon.<p>Even if we figure out a relocation plan, that solves a minor part of the problem. Worse, those low skilled, high risk employees are now in another part of the country, first to be laid off and with no social network once they are.<p>There is NO solution that doesn’t involve either make work programs OR a guaranteed income OR people homeless and starving.

Ames, IA. NCAA Div I university.<p>Columbia, MO. NCAA Div I university.<p>Lincoln, NE. NCAA Div I university.<p>Iowa City, IA. NCAA Div I university.<p>Fargo, ND. NCAA Div I university.<p>Waterloo&#x2F;Cedar Falls, IA. NCAA Div I university.<p>Mankato, MN. NCAA Div II university.<p>St. Cloud,MN. NCAA Div II university.<p>Rochester, MN. The town Mayo built&#x2F;healthcare.<p>Notice a pattern here? At least a third of the &quot;metro&quot; locations mentioned are homes to NCAA Division I or II universities. Low unemployment? Yep. Low-paying jobs (even for technical positions)? Yep. (A friend of mine from one of the above Div. I &quot;metros&quot; says semi-tongue-in-cheek: so many grads love the area and want to stay, a convenience store job requires a Masters).<p>Rochester is essentially healthcare through Mayo. If you&#x27;re not a healthcare professional, good luck. IBM used to have a major presence there, but I don&#x27;t know how much now.

&quot;...Mailing unemployment insurance checks to people who aren&#x27;t so much unemployed as unemployable is obviously not an ideal public policy. But simply doing nothing for them is cruel and insane...&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s look at our choices presented by the author. 1) Each of us gives money from his pocket to pay people to do things nobody else wants them to do, whether sitting on the couch, sweeping the streets, whatever, or 2) Be insane and cruel.<p>Certainly such a discussion must have a bit more nuance than that, right?<p>I&#x27;m not going to dive into the argument, because there will be plenty of it, mostly non-productive. I just wanted to point out the premise the article is written around. Such premises do not make for good discussions by people of varying opinions.

Long-term unemployed have always been doomed.<p>However, a high unemployment rate (suppose 15%) means that the average person is out of a job 15% of the time. In most cases, this is <i>not really that devastating</i>. The problem right now is the unemployment benefits last so long that you can stay out of a job to the point that you become irrelevant.<p>Learning new skills takes effort, and usually requires you to take a pay cut as you get an entry-level job in a new field. Everyone can do it, though. Instead, though, we are incentivising long-term laziness by granting money to people who aren&#x27;t working. I know at least two people who are just living off their unemployment checks and not making any effort to find real work.<p>If the unemployed are getting a check, then people who are employed should get that same check while employed. I think that&#x27;s the only way to keep the incentive to work. (This goes back to the idea of a minimum guaranteed income)

The idea of relocation assistance has always been something that interested me. I often split time between Vermont and NYC, and don&#x27;t totally get why there aren&#x27;t more programs to help people living in a rough, low-income housing projects get to VT (or one of the other areas), where you can easily find jobs and a nice place to rent for $300&#x2F;month.

We&#x27;d probably save a lot of money in the long term if we helped people with mental illness. Many who are long term unemployed or out of the work force all together, are so because of addictions or depression.<p>Then again, there actually are some legit lazy people that will only ever work enough to buy hydro and a roof over their head.

If unemployment continues to drop or even accelerates its downward trend without a corresponding drop in the labor force participation rate, can we at least consider the possibility that some fraction of the &quot;long term unemployed&quot; would always remain unemployed up until the moment when they ceased being paid not to work?<p>Or, if you want to be more generous, ceased facing a massive effective marginal &quot;taxation&quot; rate on their first couple thousand dollars of monthly income.<p>I don&#x27;t mean this as a moral judgment. I can imagine a host of situations where being paid $20,000 a year or so to evaluate your employment options and otherwise spend a lot of time doing non-wage-earning activities like spending time with your kids would make perfect sense.<p>I know that one condition of receiving unemployment benefits is to be looking for work, but I&#x27;d be surprised if that is hard to fulfill.

Historically Oil booms help too. Most the places he mentioned are going through a fracking renaissance. More importantly, it&#x27;s low skill and high pay, but often cold and demanding work (say Midland isn&#x27;t cold to the roughneck wrestling with the well in January.)

It&#x27;s comforting to know that this, along with so many other things that most people have to take for granted, doesn&#x27;t apply to software developers.<p>Our little corner of the world is still so employee-friendly that it&#x27;s really hard to damage your career in any meaningful way if you&#x27;re truly, provably good at what you do. Certainly not by taking the odd five years off to start a startup, travel the world, or play pickup basketball.<p>You&#x27;ll still have your network when you decide to come back. Those guys will be nicely distributed across dozens of tech companies, all of which need developers like they need air.

&quot;What it has gotten you is a UI check. Take away the check, there&#x27;s no point in bothering&quot;<p>Wait, the sole reason these people were looking for a job was to get a steady unemployment insurance check?

This article fails to recognize that there are more ways to earn an income than &quot;get a job&quot; . Write a (book|song|game|movie), grow some food, sell a service, invent something, sell some clothes.<p>One year I was laid off and &quot;employed&quot; 3 days later because I became a freelance contractor. For the right price many many skills are marketable.<p>I as a businessman would never turn away someone who had the nerve, need and drive to come to me and say &quot;I&#x27;ll bust my ass for half my usual price, just dont let me starve&quot;.

&gt; The country failed these people first by letting the labor market stay so slack for so long that they became unhirable, and now we&#x27;re going to fail them again.<p>This seems suspect. People lose jobs for specific reasons. Maybe a specific sector is shrinking. Maybe automation is replacing workers of a certain skill set. Maybe cheap labor elsewhere caused your employer to move.<p>Blaming &quot;the country&quot; for failing these people &quot;by letting the labor market stay so slack&quot; is meaningless in its vagueness.

We&#x27;re living in a 21st century economy with 20th century ideas on work. The economy doesn&#x27;t need 40+ hours from everyone to produce what we need. I agree with some others here that a Basic Income at a reasonable level would help out a lot.

You also have older workers although well educated a nd skilled, pushed out of the economy via ageism but still far from retirement.

I don&#x27;t get. Just create more jobs! There are plenty of things that need to be done and those unemployed shouldn&#x27;t be left in the cold so we are going to pay them something anyway. The only &quot;valid&quot; reason there are able and unemployed people is &quot;to scare the shit out of the middle class&quot;.

the majority haven&#x27;t been looking for work.. I was long term unemployeed.. I sent out a minimum of 10 resumes everyday until I got a job.. it paid shit, but at least i was no longer on the tit of america.<p>The problem with long term unemployment is the same issue I ran into the other day on an elevator.. One girl asks another girl, &quot;did you get a job yet?&quot; the girl responds, &quot;Giiiirrrrrl, da gubament gonna give me 2 hundred dollas a week, why i gonna get a jerb?&quot;<p>Get em off the tit and get em working or they starve and die.. either way win win for us all.