Forget the Good Jobs Report, Long-Term Unemployment Is Still Terrifying

It's about loss of skills, loss of trust, and loss of networks. The longer people are out of work, the more they presumably forget. That's the loss of skills. But even if that's not actually true, and it might not be, employers assume it is -- there's a stigma to being out of work that long. That's the loss of trust. Now, that's particularly hard for the long-term unemployed to overcome since being unemployed for so long hurts the kind of professional networks that are often so important to finding a job. The only way for the long-term unemployed to get a job is to already have one. It's a vicious catch-22.

In other words, the long-term unemployed are at the back of the jobs line. And it's quite a long line. As you can see below, the job calculator from the Hamilton Project estimates it would take us 8 years to get back to full employment at our current 3-month average of 190,000 jobs-a-month. The long-term unemployed will be unemployable by then.