Employment market in dire straits

There’s absolutely no doubt about it; the labor market is in dire straits and struggling to stay afloat. The recession that has beset all of us has left behind a barren wasteland that the unemployed are left to roam, with no one spared its aftereffects. A double dip recession is still a possibility, no matter how unlikely, but it is not this that we should be worried. There are deeper social ills that all of us must guard against if we are to avoid falling over the edge and into the chasm that we faced as a nation last year. The US is still not safe from complete catastrophe and this is terrible news for the unemployed or otherwise.

A joint report released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that the loss of jobs since the onset of the crisis is close to 30 million, and this number is 210 million globally. The wounds are there, giant gaping scars that time may not heal entirely and this long-lasting sign of unemployment represents a very risk to the innate stability, if any, of existing economies. That is because the same study indicated that the most notable victims of this recession are those that are in their early twenties. These young adults develop a mindset in which they lose faith in the working of public machinery. Ironically, as and when output does rebound, there might not be a need for a lot of extra workers, making it even harder to re-employ those that were laid off at the height of the recession. In fact, the global economy needs to create some 45 million jobs a year over the next decade just to stay afloat and stem the rot of unemployment.

With each downturn, the number of workers that have been laid off for lengthy periods of time have increased steadily with each passing slump in the economy, but this most recent recession has been astounding in its intensity. It’s like comparing a Hulk smash to a karate chop; both are devastating, but one much more so. In the US of A alone, the numbers of unemployed that have been made to sit on the sidelines have done so for the last six months. Do you want to know when that happened last? The great depression, that’s when. Spain has been shaken out of its siesta with its incredible 20% unemployment rate while Great Britain isn’t doing so great with figures hovering near 8% (7.8%, to be precise). Perhaps a fiscal stimulus can be readied if it does help break down unemployment. If it does help matters, that stimulus will actually pay itself off.