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Need. (photo: twolf1)
From an article posted to The New Yorker magazine, and in a reference to a study by Daniel Sullivan and Till Van Wachter. The researchers demonstrated a large risk for a shorter life expectancy (1.5 years) for long-term unemployed, 30 to 40 years of age. A 15 to 20 % increase in death rates over 20 years. Negative risks for long-term-jobless did not reduce to zero until the age at the time of the job loss was age 60. Clearly, for this sample, being younger and jobless carried a greater risk. This is a sufficient reason to put people back to work in government created jobs programs. The latter suggestion which seems so obvious to the unemployed, eludes politicians and the economists who advise them.
The authors looked at the effects on mortality and income of long-term unemployment on workers victimized by a recession in 1980-1982. Our current long-term unemployment appears to be institutionalized and permanent. News articles often comment on the lack of jobs for recent graduates and the inability to pay back college loans. But Big Media focus has been on the immediate, near term effects of prolonged unemployment for the economy. Sure. There will reduced revenues. Of course. And unemployed people will shop less too. Unfortunately, the news media will not focus on mortality, (decreased life expectancy), and also not on long-term, economic losses.
We are consistently redirected away from the real casualties of this economic depression. The impact on the young unemployed is now out in the open: reduced life span, reduced economic prospects, and a host of other problems. Perhaps my own focus on the fate of these young persons twenty five years out, when they are nearing retirement, is misplaced. In addition to preserving Social Security for them, perhaps I should be working hard to give them jobs to feel secure in now.
I have been writing recently about income inequality. Prolonged unemployment must contribute to a sense of the unfairness of an economic system, where politicians talk a great deal about cutting the cost of government, instead of how government is going to help you to get a job by stepping up to the challenge and creating a job for you.
27 Comments
Have you seen any studies that tracks what occurs with multiple stressors and their effects. As in, a 25 year old unemployed for 2 year person, who also happens to be African American or Native American. Do the different stressors add up and compound the effects of unemployment or is no looking.
I keep thinking about the effects of the famine in the Netherlands during WWII, and how all these decades later, the neurological and mental health consequences remain.
Have you seen anything that addresses this?
Hi walkinboots!
I don’t have access to literature databases, but I will look into what is on the web to ask your question there. That study of the Netherlands’ Starvation babies was profoundly disturbing: it all counts. It is a logical next question, that of additive effects of racism and social stressors.
The authors in the cited study found that there was almost a stronger relationship between income loss and mortality, than there was between job loss and mortality. They theorized that there were subsequent negative effects cascading from income loss: loss of insurance, mental health difficulties, relationship and family distress and so on.
Wilkinson & Pickett recognized that prejudice is corrosive and increases the impact of income inequality. Being excluded from educational and job opportunities further increases income inequality differences, then flowing into worse health and social outcomes. In introducing their evidence of the connection between income inequality and levels of social trust in communities, they cite the Katrina example of abandonment of poor, blacks in New Orleans as the breakdown of a flooded city, due to its extreme class and racial divisions in a crisis. The prejudices on display when police suspected blacks of ‘looting’ and whites of ‘looking for food’ are given as definitions of inequality. The lack of empathy shown for victims of the flooding was a stunning display of racism and inequality. The authors make sure that the readers understand that income inequality is often the stepchild of malicious racism, but always the product of dehumanization.
Let me get back to you later with anything I can find about additive effects and compounding.
Oh, TomThumb, don’t make any work for yourself, I can look. Just thought that with fresh eyes going over the research, perhaps you had stumbled upon such.
Really points to an entire overhaul, on every level of our structures, if we are to do right by the all of us that are “us”. Planet wise. Whew. Big task. I think this topic is so worthy of attention. I sincerely thank you for bringing it here.
Racist discrimination in employment appears to account for really high unemployment rates:
From one study.
Thanks for the encouragement.
Here’s the expanded investigation: Andy Kroll’s What we don’t talk about when we talk about jobs.
“How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America’s Crippling Jobs Crisis
By Andy Kroll”
I’m glad you added the bits at #2, TomThumb. I didn’t click into the study, but I get a little squidgey about ‘related to’ verbs, as in: not necessarily proving causality, etc. There just can be so many other factors at play, and some studies don’t try to filter them out.
Sad and sick doin’s no matter what; this just can’t hold, and I hope more people start waking up to the fact.
Good job, and rec’d.
This is a study of Black Male Employment in Milwaukee and 20 other metropolitan areas. Done by University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
That link was found in a general report on extremely high levels of black unemployment at the BlackAgendaReport.org site in this article.
This cannot stand!
The Milwaukee study in #7 is damning the whole nation as a racist enterprise with blacks having 13% of the population and 40% of the seats in prisons. Table one in Levine’s study compares employed blacks, whites, and Hispanic males in Milwaukee. In 1970 the respective numbers were: 73.4, 85.9 and 80.4. In 2010, the percentages employed were respectively, 44.7 %,77.4%, abd 65.0% employed. That means that in 2010, in Milwaukee, blacks had an effective unemployment rate of 55.3%. That does not include black males from Milwaukee incarcerated at 5000 per years and loss of their spots in local manufacturing jobs (from 54% representation in manufacturing jobs in 1970 to 14% in 2010). Looks like systematic exclusion for blacks and structural unemployment due to racism.
Very saddening and eye opening.
TPTB are just fine with this, mind you.
The first study of unemployment and mortality was ‘race blind’, not race neutral, because it ended up obscuring racial inequalities.
The Milwaukee Male Employment study strongly points to structural racist exclusion of blacks and Hispanics from employment.
A third study of black poverty and mortality, strongly points toward income inequality as a source of mortality differences. Where you are poor counts too.
McCord and Freeman, in their study, ‘Excess mortality in Harlem’ (1990) found that a black person in Harlem had less of a chance of living to 65 than a person in Bangladesh. The authors noted that continuous exposure to social injustice, inequalities, might be additional factor in the extreme mortality rates for blacks.
The direction of causality is difficult to assess but for blacks, just being impoverished does not account for the extreme mortality rates. Looks like income inequality is still a powerful factor.
Shorter life expectancy among the disadvantaged is not a bug, its a feature.
The PTB wants people to die before they arrive at the age at which they can collect Social Security.
That’s why cigarettes are legal. They harvest their victims at precisely the right age.
It’s not just racial prejudice. Although my last few years working for nursing agencies proved again and again that Calif. employers would rather hire newly arrived Latina immigrants than black women. After all, people born in this county, including black women, know the law, know how to insist on getting their overtime payments, know that eliminating certain styles of “client care” is not legal.
It is the fact that older people who need work come with a very high price tag. Not only in terms of their needing higher salaries. But in terms of health care costs.
This is where it was essential that we as a nation got Single Payer HC or MediCare for all. I was told to my face, while looking for work, that my chances of getting hired by a certain nursing agency were close to nil, as my age meant the health insurance costs for the employer would be too high. (Don’t have one of the types of phones that would have recorded such a conversation – so no possibility of taking that company to court.)
Every progressive needs to inform themselves about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), in general, and its call for a federal job gurantee (JG), in particular. If there ever was a proposal that OWS should get behind, it is this one. The effects of unemployment, as you say, are economic, social, and deeply personal — and very pervasive.
We simply cnnot have the progressive society we strive for without a federal job guarantee program. It should be a nonegotiable political demand — a litmus test for progressives.
I agree with you. The sample for the Sullivan and Van Wachter longitudinal study was taken from 1980-through-1982. That recession was time-limited and our current economic depression seems “institutionalized and permanent”. Now it is much harder to access work for older workers because of the need for health care insurance and employers’ unwillingness to pay those costs. Was it always so?
As Masaccio points out in his post today, the unions are not there anymore; the manufacturing plants and their jobs are not there anymore; the good government is not there anymore; and the banks as honest brokers, are not there anymore. This is a different depression.
On a personal note: Good luck to you.
How should we put a job guarantee program together? How do we create equality of income?
You would need some type of law that ensured private industry hired first from the JG program rather than raiding competitors.
Currently we have a “unemployed need not apply” problem. You would have to make sure there didn’t develop a negative JG stigma as the government becomes the employer of last resort.
As someone who was laughed out of an interview when I told them I how long I had been unemployed, I recognize the truth of the dilemma of employer discrimination against the unemployed. But I really want to know what kind of alternative you would suggest to the current ‘free market” chaos.
Would you consider a program like Argentina’s program for their jobless?
Sorry. This was written as a reply to both econo and yourself.
This is a great discussion and valid points all but before we fix the rudder on this boat we need to plug up the giant hole in the hull before we sink. If we made a list of things to do I hope we can all agree on the first thing which I hope is Get Money out of Politics and start electing real progressive to hash out these very important issues like a good government is designed to do. We have a chance during the next redepression to make these changes and universal employment like single payer healthcare will follow.IMHO
Unemployment is a cancer. That says it all.
Can you say government job guarantee (JG) as promoted by l Randall Wray. He writes about it over at NEP. It is a guaranteed job for everyone, everyone, no matter his age, education or ability. We need a progressive politician to take up this cause.
When I read #13 I Googled JG, so I’m no expert. But as I read up, it came to me that it would take a mindset change, or laws, to get employers to hire from “the government pool”.
Why? They hire now from the unemployed pool. A JG means, by definition,you are working. If near everyone was in the JG where are you going to hire someone, except from the JG pool.
We do need congress to agree to it. That starts with one progressive politician, with a pair.
Argentina once had a JG and it hired over a million. I don’t think they have the same program today. You can read about it over at the levy institute site. Pavelina Techrenova (sp?) did a lot of writing on the argentine Jeffes program.
Equality of income is a separate issue. The JG would guarantee the same minimum wage, like $10 per hour, to everyone who wanted to work. Equalizing income involves first full employment and then maybe taxes to redistribute income through the tax code, you know like if you make more than a million you pay half to the excess in tax.
I like the Argentina program.
It sets a salary base for all employment which provides for some income inequality as do Japanese constraints on salary differences.
Tcherneva and Wray make a good point: People can create programs to meet community needs as they did in Argentina, or create programs which work in different ways, depending upon what communities need or what governments allow. It is an open source idea.
At the link in the first sentence, they start to describe the characteristics of their idea on page 4. It is worth reading.
I’ve seen it. The only problem is politics. How in the world do you get it accepted. Wray has written several blogs about it in his Modern Money Primer at NEP. It’s hard not to like but some do for various reasons.
As I pointed out in #16, employers don’t always hire from the unemployed pool.
Some may think that the unemployed are non-workers. So they raid from their competitors.
Stigma would be a problem unless there was a seachange in the culture, as I tried to say.
Oh, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: bullets would have to fly at a job fair before such a paradigm shift to take place. In fact, I suspect that’s exactly what the PTB want: they’re waiting patiently until the day where an employer laughs at the WRONG person in response to how long they’re been unemployed, and that person corks his or her laughter with an emptied clip or two. Because it’ll be a day that’ll “change everything” again — just like SepCenter The 11th!1!
When enough dead bodies pile up, that’s when politicians will conveniently start caring about all the unemployment discrimination going on. Until then, they’re waiting on some of the unemployed great unwashed “crazy fringes” to start something they don’t have to the testicular fortitude to do themselves: thin the herd. There’s an old alpha male expression: If it’s got tits or tires, its bound to give you problems. Alpha male politicians have “improved” on that expression with “The Three C’s”: if it’s got children, a cunt, or happens to be corpse, it’s bound to help you get elected/re-elected.