Question

Research Unemployment Crisis in the United States.

500-word essay

Solutions to unemployment post-Covid-19 crisis

Answer 1

Definitions of unemployment

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has defined the basic employment concepts as follows

People with jobs are employed.

• People who are jobless, looking for jobs within the last 4 weeks, and available for work are unemployed.
• People who are neither employed nor have looked for a job within the last 4 weeks are not included in the labor force.

Unemployment generally falls during periods of economic prosperity and rises during recessions, creating significant pressure on public finances as tax revenue falls and social safety net costs increase. Government spending and taxation decisions (fiscal policy) and U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate adjustments (monetary policy) are important tools for managing the unemployment rate. There may be an economic trade-off between unemployment and inflation, as policies designed to reduce unemployment can create inflationary pressure, and vice versa. The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) has a dual mandate to achieve full employment while maintaining a low rate of inflation. The major political parties debate appropriate solutions for improving the job creation rate, with liberals arguing for more government spending and conservatives arguing for lower taxes and less regulation. Polls indicate that Americans believe job creation is the most important government priority, with not sending jobs overseas the primary solution.

Unemployment can be measured in several ways. A person is defined as unemployed in the United States if they are jobless, but have looked for work in the last four weeks and are available for work. People who are neither employed nor defined as unemployed are not included in the labor force calculation. For example, as of September 2017, the unemployment rate in the United States was 4.2% or 6.8 million people,^[6] while the government's broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the part-time underemployed was 8.3%. Both of these rates were below the November 2007 level that preceded the Great Recession. These figures were calculated with a civilian labor force of approximately 159.6 million people, relative to a U.S. population of approximately 326 million people.The unemployment rates (U-3 and U-6) fell steadily from 2010 to 2018.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a monthly "Employment Situation Summary" with key statistics and commentary. As of June 2018, approximately 128.6 million people in the United States have found full-time work (at least 35 hours a week in total), while 27.0 million worked part-time. There were 4.7 million working part-time for economic reasons, meaning they wanted but could not find full-time work, the lowest level since January 2008.

The BLS reported that in July 2018, there were 94.1 million persons age 16+ outside the labor force. Of these, 88.6 million (94%) did not want a job while 5.5 million (6%) wanted a job. Key reasons persons age 16+ are outside the labor force include retired, disabled or illness, attending school, and caregiving.As of May 2018, there were 126.3 million age 25-54 (prime working age) persons in the U.S. As of April 2018, about 23 million aged 25–54 persons were outside the labor force (7 million men and 16 million women). The Congressional Budget Office reported that as of December 2017, the primary reason for men age 25–54 to be outside the labor force was illness/disability (50% or 3.5 million), while the primary reason for women was due to family care-giving (60% or 9.6 million

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. was approximately 2.5 million workers below full employment as of the end of 2015 and 1.6 million at December 31, 2016, mainly due to lower labor force participation. As of May 2018, there were more job openings (6.6 million) than people defined as unemployed (6.0 million) in the U.S.

In September 2019, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 3.5%, near the lowest rate in 50 years.

On May 8, 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 20.5 million nonfarm jobs were lost and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent in April, due to the Coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

In March 2020, during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, American unemployment saw a huge increase; claims in one week rose to 3.3 million from 281,000 on the previous week. The previous record for unemployment claims in one week was only about one fifth as high, at 695,000 claims in 1982More than 38 million Americans lost their jobs and applied for government aid. including nearly 4 million people in California, in the eight weeks since the coronavirus pandemic began.